The suspected mastermind behind a series of blasts that killed 62 people in New Delhi markets last month is better known as a successful executive and family man, newspaper reports said yesterday.
Tariq Dar, a suspected member of Pakistan-based Islamic militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, was arrested in the Indian Kashmir summer capital of Srinagar on Thursday and brought to the capital for questioning, police said.
Dar, who has not been charged, was linked to the blasts at two crowded markets and a bus on Oct. 29 through phone taps and bank records, newspaper reports and police said.
The arrest of Dar, an international drug company executive and father who had broken links to a militant group as a teenager, surprised family members and a journalist who interviewed him for a book on Kashmir.
"When I last met him in December 2002, he had just got engaged to be married. He was, like anybody his age, excited about his first love," recalled journalist Pradeep Thakur in the Times of India.
Dar also occasionally wrote for a Kashmiri magazine called Mount Valley.
Now in his 30s, Dar apparently started out selling creams, bandages and baby oil from town to town until he was promoted and given sales responsibility for the entire Kashmir Valley.
He was in Delhi on Oct. 5 to receive a sales excellence award from his company, his wife told reporters.
But police say he was also planning the deadly blasts which wounded 210 people ahead of the major Hindu festival of Diwali.
On Sunday, police said they noted Dar as a suspect after finding a debit card bill for a hotel stay in the first week of October.
They followed up by reviewing his bank account details which showed a wire transfer of almost US$11,500 had been made by a person based in the Middle East days before the blast, police said.
Police said a subsequent tapped mobile phone conversation to Pakistan, during which Dar spoke about the blasts, confirmed their suspicions.
But Dar's parents still cannot believe his guilt, even though he was an activist for a militant group as a teenager.
"They are falsely implicating my son," Gulam Qadir, his father, told reporters on Sunday.
In 1992 Dar apparently cut his rebel ties, enrolled in a chemistry course in a Srinagar college and was soon on his way to becoming a white-collar executive, the Times of India's Thakur said. He liked to dress up to go out to eat Kashmiri specialities at local hotels, Thakur said. But that life crumbled last Thursday when police chased him down in his Maruti Alto car as he drove to Srinagar with a friend.
Paul said police found that Dar made a call to a news agency office in Srinagar to claim that Lashkar had not carried out the bombings. The blasts were claimed by an obscure rebel group. Soon after the blasts,
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh indicated the possibility of Pakistani involvement and called on Islamabad to do more to fight terrorism.
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