Archive for July, 2009

pakistan

Pakistan investigation agencies have, for the very first time, revealed that they have adequate proof that the banned Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT ) is directly involved in the 26/11 terror attack.

A Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) report handed over to India says the material recovered from LeT camps in Karachi and Thatta indicates that the terrorists received training and weapons.

“The investigation has established beyond any reasonable doubt that the defunct LeT activists conspired, abetted, planned, financed and established communication network to carry out terror attacks in Mumbai,” the report states.

Officials said they have also recovered handwritten diaries, training manuals, Indian maps and operational instructions from Lashkar camps.

“The accused were running training camps for terrorists, providing sea and navigational training, conducting intelligence courses and directions for terrorist attack,” the report said.

It discloses that training sessions for the attackers was codenamed ‘Azizabad’ (Azizabad is one of the neighbourhoods of Gulberg Town in Karachi). The investigators seized militant literature, inflatable lifeboats, detailed maps of the Indian coastline, handwritten literature on navigational training and an intelligence course manual.

eclipse

A long wait by sky gazers to look at a rare celestial event will end tomorrow when the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century will be seen.

A total eclipse occurs when the Sun is completely obscured by the Moon. The intensely bright disk of the Sun is replaced by the dark silhouette of the Moon.

During the total eclipse, totality is visible only from a narrow track on the surface of the Earth.

The Indian cities through which the shadow of total eclipse passes are Bhavnagar, Surat, Ujjain, Indore, Bhopal, Sagar, Jabalpur, Varanasi, Allahabad, Gaya, Patna, Bhagalpur, Jalpaigudi, Guwahati and Dibrugarh.

The countries to witness the path of the Moon’s umbral shadow are India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China.

kasaab

Pakistani terrorist Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, in his dramatic confession before a special court on Monday, alleged that an Indian helped him in his training and taught him Hindi.

Little is known about Abu Jundal, the man Kasab alleges was one of the handler of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai in November last year.

Reports suggest Jundal hails from Hyderabad and was recruited by Pakistani agency ISI Inter-Services Intelligence and sent to terrorist camps for training.

Jundal’s name has cropped up in investigations into blasts at Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Delhi and other places. Jundal is believed to be linked to the Indian Mujahideen, the terrorist group which has claimed responsibility for a series of bomb attacks on Indian cities.

Jundal is also believed to be a trusted aide of Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, one of the five Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives detained by Pakistan for the attacks on Mumbai.

The Pakistani terrorist on Monday surprised the court when he rose and told Tahilyani in Urdu: “Sir, I would like to plead guilty to all the charges against me.”

kasaab

Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, the main killer terrorist in the Mumbai 26/11 attacks, Monday confessed to his role & admitted he was a Pakistani and narrated in chilling detail the events leading to the killing spree that left 180 people dead in the most brutal terror attack India has seen.
Kasab  recounted how he and his associates undertook the sea voyage from Karachi to Mumbai to strike at 13 locations here on the night of Nov 26, 2008.
Kasab’s confession included minute details of his role in the attacks on the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) and Cama Hospital nearby
He revealed in the court names of his Pakistani handlers, including Abu Hamza, Abu Jindal, Abu Kafa and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who saw them off when they boarded a ship at Karachi.
Hamza, who Indian intelligence agencies believe was behind the attack on the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in December 2005, advised them on how to go about the terror attacks, said Kasab. He also described how he placed a bomb in a taxi that later exploded at Mazagaon, a south Mumbai area.
Naming Lakhvi of the Lashkar-e-Taiba  as ‘the mastermind’ behind the Mumbai attacks, Kasab recounted how he and his associate Abu Ismail (who was shot by the police) went to a CST public toilet and assembled one of the bombs by installing a timer on it for use later.
He stunned the courtroom by giving details of his encounters with then Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare and his associate Vijay Salaskar inside Cama Hospital and how he finally killed him.
Kasab described how the entire journey from Karachi to Mumbai was completed in four different boats at various locations in the Arabian Sea and how they finally landed in South Mumbai’s Colaba in an inflatable rubber dingy, opposite Badhwar Park, the residence of top railway officials.
Kasab interspersed his shocking confessional with the statements given by several of the 124 witnesses already examined by Special Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam to prove his statements.
According to Nikam, Kasab’s confession came after he discussed the entire issue with his government-appointed lawyer S.G. Abbas Kazmi.
‘This is a victory of truth, and a victory for the prosecution. His confession came all of a sudden and he has admitted to all the crimes against him,’ Nikam said.

Chandrayaan sensor fails

satelite

India’s only satellite orbiting the moon came close to overheating and failure but scientists improvised to save it, officials said Friday

The launch of Chandrayaan-1 last fall put India in an elite group to have lunar missions along with the U.S., Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China.

Chandrayaan-I, launched in October last with a two-year life span, has lost a major sensor and may meet a premature end, ISRO said today. “Unfortunately, during the last month we have lost a vital sensor — the star sensor,” ISRO Chief G Madhavan Nair said.

“Like in the olden days when one used to look at the stars to fix a direction, likewise an onboard electronic equipment was doing all this and it was required for precise pointing (towards the moon). With its loss we are really worried,” he said.

“But to the credit of the ISRO scientific team, they have worked out a very innovative way of overcoming the problem,” the ISRO chief said, but added that if some more failures happen, “then we will have problems”. Nair, however, said that in the last eight months of the operation of the mission, “we have collected almost all the data that we wanted” and that most of its objectives have already been completed.