Who was “Kharak Singh” and what role he played in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack was the curious query coming from the Supreme Court during the hearing of Pakistan terrorist Ajmal Kasab’s case and in response counsel for the Maharashtra government said it was a “fictitious” identity given by a man who prepared the ground work for the carnage and investigation is still on to find out the real face.
“We still want 36 perpetrators of Mumbai attack. We only got 10 (Kasab and nine of his accomplices killed). Kharak Singh is a ‘fictitious’ identity and the investigation is still on to find out the real person,” Maharasthra’s counsel Gopal Subramaniam told a bench of Justices Aftab Alam and C.K. Prasad after it evinced keen interest in the character of Kharak Singh.
Mr Subramaniam said the investigation done in collaboration with US agency FBI, Kharak Singh used “callphonex” portal run by Jordanian national Nazir-Al-Sharief from a small garage in New Jersey to talk or send emails to some people in Pakistan, US and Russia.
“Kharak Singh was writing English in native and rustic spellings, which was a slang type of text. He had given 15 ID number to callphonex and initially paid Nazir $500 in two instalments. He was desperate to establish link with his contacts in Pakistan, US and Russia in October 2008 over a month before the attack. This has come in a statement of FBI detective Jeffery Mason, who interrogated Nazir in Los Angels,” Mr Subramaniam said.
The revelation came while the top court examined the transcripts of the conversation of Kasab and his nine killed accomplices with their “Lashkar-e-Tayyaba” handlers in Paksitan. Nazir later had raised a demand of $1,500 from Kharak Singh after he made extensive use of his network. Entire payment to him was routed through Karachi.
In response to court’s query as to how Nazir was not involved in the conspiracy, Maharashtra counsel said FBI probe revealed that he was only running a commercial business of providing his portal for making cheap calls, which could not be detected or tracked easily in India because of the sophistication of the technology used.