Eight years after he had India on tenterhooks for a week, IC-814 principal hijacker Ibrahim Athar, referred to as “chief” during the hijack, has reappeared on the Indian terror scene as the mastermind, facilitator and trainer of the foiled Jaish-e-Mohammed operation to abduct Rahul Gandhi.Younger brother of Jaish head Maulana Masood Azhar, the dangerous Athar is learnt to have imparted training to the three militants — Mohammed Abid, Yusuf and Mirza Rashid — nabbed by UP police. While Rahul Gandhi was the main target, the other two high profile politicians on the list were former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Leader of Opposition L K Advani.It’s learnt that the three operatives have revealed that they were imparted training for close to three months under personal guidance of Athar at a camp near Sialkot in Pakistan. They were shown videos of these leaders and some other lower profile politicians as part of their training programme.Security agencies have been receiving inputs on groups like Jaish working on such a plot since last year. As reported in The Sunday Express on October 8 last year, the Centre had ordered a complete security review of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and son Rahul after such inputs. This was around the time when the UP poll campaign was set to pick up pace and the two had hectic travel schedules planned for them.While the UP campaign went off incident-free with the Special Protection Group stepping up security to unprecedented levels, alarm bells rang again when reliable information came early this year that a secret meeting had happened in Berlin between Sikh militant groups and the Lashkar-e-Toiba at the behest of Pakistan-based handlers.That meeting, sources said, is said to have again focused on abduction as a strategy to obtain release of key militants, including Parliament attack accused Mohammed Afzal. This was also the first time that Robert Vadra’s name appeared on the list.However, sources indicate that Jaish plans were separate from these efforts and, perhaps, more concrete. As it now emerges, sufficient groundwork was done in India like preparing videos and doing surveys, all of which could then be used for training purposes.As for Athar, he is now in his early 40s and has largely been involved in behind-the-scenes preparations, carrying forward Jaish’s terror operations. He led the IC-814 hijack, then affiliated to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, and was referred to as “chief” during the hijack, and along with four other accomplices hijacked this Indian Airlines plane mid-air from Kathmandu to Kandahar with stops at Amritsar, Lahore and Dubai.In a week long drama, he was successful in obtaining the release of three dreaded terrorists — brother Masood Azhar, Syed Omar Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar. He was responsible for the killing of Rippan Katyal, one of the IC-814 passengers.His identity as a Pakistan national was verified on the basis of an application form for a Nepalese visa in Karachi in November 1999, a month before the hijack, where he applied under the name of Farooq Siddiqi and showed a Sindh address. The photographs matched that of Athar.Athar was also on the list of 20 most wanted terrorists based in Pakistan that New Delhi handed over to Islamabad five years back. An Interpol notice exists against him and he remains on every terror list India has made after that to make its case against Pakistan.
