Syed Abdul Karim, alias Tunda (born 1943) is an accused of masterminding over 40 bombings in India supported by Pakistani terrorists. He was arrested by Indian authorities on 16 August 2013 from the India-Nepal border at Banbasa. However, the exact timings of this arrest is disputed with various versions being reported. Later, he received a clean chit by a Delhi court in all four cases against him, although he was sentenced to life imprisonment for bomb blasts in

Sonipat Sonipat is a planned industrial city and administrative headquarter in Sonipat district of Haryana state of India. It comes under the National Capital Region and is around from New Delhi. It lies 214 km (128 miles) southwest of Chandigar ...

, Haryana.

Early life

Born in 1943 at Chatta Lal Miya area in central Delhi's Dariyaganj area, he started his career as a carpenter at his native village in Bazaar Khurd area in

Pilkhuwa Pilkhuwa is a town and a municipal board in Hapur district in the Indian States and territories of India, state of Uttar Pradesh. It is located 12 km from Hapur, the district headquarters. It is famous for its textile products and handloom indu ...

Uttar Pradesh Uttar Pradesh ( ; UP) is a States and union territories of India, state in North India, northern India. With over 241 million inhabitants, it is the List of states and union territories of India by population, most populated state in In ...

Ghaziabad district Ghaziabad district () is a largely suburban district of Uttar Pradesh state in northern India. It is also a core part of the National Capital Region. The city of Ghaziabad is the administrative headquarters of the district. This district is ...

. He married for the first time here in Uttar Pradesh. He came to Behrampura,

Ahmedabad Ahmedabad ( ), also spelled Amdavad (), is the most populous city in the Indian state of Gujarat. It is the administrative headquarters of the Ahmedabad district and the seat of the Gujarat High Court. Ahmedabad's population of 5,570,585 ...

in 1982 and started carpentry and scrap business. He looked after a mosque and taught holy books to children. He married for the second time, Mumtaz and had a son, Irshaan after a year of a marriage. He returned to Delhi in 1989. He married for the third time an 18-year-old girl, at the age of 65 in Pakistan. He has 6 children.

Later life

He came under the police radar after the Mumbai serial bombings in 1993. He got the moniker ''Tunda'' – Hindi/ Bengali (Bangla) for without a hand or physically handicapped- after his left hand got severed in an accident while preparing a bomb in 1985 in Mumbai. His younger brother Abdul Malik, who still is a carpenter, is reportedly the only immediate family member alive in India. He also stayed in Pakistan where he is known to have imparted training on the fabrication of IED and other explosives to mujahids who were sent to India from Pakistan for

jihad ''Jihad'' (; ) is an Arabic word that means "exerting", "striving", or "struggling", particularly with a praiseworthy aim. In an Islamic context, it encompasses almost any effort to make personal and social life conform with God in Islam, God ...

. During his stay in Pakistan, he had been in touch with organisations like ISI, LeT, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Indian Mujahideen and Babbar Khalsa and had been meeting people like Hafiz Saeed,

Maulana Masood Azhar Muhammad Masood Azhar Alvi (born 10 July or 7 August 1968) is a Pakistani militant leader, who is the founder and current leader of militant organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based Islamic Deobandi jihadist organisation. His actions a ...

, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Dawood Ibrahim and several others wanted by India. He used an elaborate network of human traffickers and fake currency suppliers active in Bangladesh. Tunda has also been associated with

Rohingya The Rohingya people (; ; ) are a stateless Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group who predominantly follow Islam from Rakhine State, Myanmar. Before the Rohingya genocide in 2017, when over 740,000 fled to Bangladesh, an estimated 1.4 million Ro ...

operatives in the past. His association with LeT commanders Rehan alias Zafar and Azam Cheema alias Babajee is well known.

Role in terrorism

After being indoctrinated by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the 1980s, Tunda became a jihadi at the age of 40. After allegedly masterminding 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, in 1994, he fled to Bangladesh where he taught making bombs to jihadi elements and in 1998, he acted as 'mentor' to give training to younger generation of Lashkar operatives in terror camps in Pakistan. In 1994, Tunda's name surfaced in Chhattisgarh Express bomb blast near Ghaziabad railway station that claimed 19 lives. In 1994, Delhi Police and the intelligence bureau raided a home in the Ashok Nagar area after receiving a tip-off from sources but Tunda managed to escape before being nabbed. Security agencies found explosives, detonators, Pak made weapons and objectionable documents written in Urdu from his hideout in huge quantity. In 1996, an Interpol Red Corner notice was issued against Tunda. In 1997, after returning to India, he was involved in a bomb blast that took place near Punjabi Bagh in west Delhi in a Blueline bus that killed at least four people and injured around 24 people. It is believed that he died in a blast in Bangladesh in 2000 but Abdul Razzaq, an LeT operative arrested by the Delhi police in 2005, revealed about his presence in Pakistan. Tunda's name was on number 15 in a dossier of "most wanted terrorists" that India handed over to Pakistan after

26/11 The 2008 Mumbai attacks, also referred to as 26/11 attacks, were a series of coordinated Islamic terrorism, Islamist terrorist attacks that took place in November 2008, when 10 members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based Islamist terrorist o ...

Mumbai terror attacks. He is also believed to be guiding the banned Students Islamic Movement of India ( SIMI), which later turned into Indian Mujahideen. Besides that, he was planning to 'recruit' Rohingyas from Myanmar to target Buddhists there. He had tried to carry out serial explosions in Delhi just before the

Commonwealth Games The Commonwealth Games is a quadrennial international multi-sport event among athletes from the Commonwealth of Nations, which consists mostly, but not exclusively, of territories of the former British Empire. The event was first held in 1930 ...

in 2010 but the plan was foiled as his accomplices were arrested. According to reports, it emerged that Tunda aims at carrying out blasts at crowded places and inflict maximum casualties. A close aide of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim,

Jamaat-ud-Dawa Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is a Pakistani Islamist militant organization driven by a Salafi jihadist ideology. The organisation's primary stated objective is to merge the whole of Kashmir with Pakistan. It was founded in 1985–1986 by Hafiz Saeed ...

chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed and top LeT commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, an "expert bomb maker", Tunda was accused of masterminding over 40 cases of bomb blasts in Mumbai, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Hyderabad and Surat. Tunda was a prized catch by the Delhi police in the war against terror, who took shelter in various countries after fleeing India 20 years back. He had a major hand in spreading Laskhar-e-Taiba's network outside Jammu and Kashmir.

Arrest

The Special Cell of Delhi Police arrested 70 years old Tunda on 16 August 2013 in Uttarakhand's Banbasa area close to the Nepal border on the basis of an information provided by R&AW. He possessed a Pakistani passport issued on 23 January 2013. Arrested in 2013, he was taken to court. Tunda was sentenced to life imprisonment by a trial court in October 2017 for his involvement in the 1996 Sonepat bomb blasts in Haryana.

Health

He was admitted to AIIMS, New Delhi with health complications in August 2013. An

angiography Angiography or arteriography is a medical imaging technique used to visualize the inside, or lumen, of blood vessels and organs of the body, with particular interest in the arteries, veins, and the heart chambers. Modern angiography is perfo ...

revealed blockages in vessels in his heart. Doctors implanted a

pacemaker A pacemaker, also known as an artificial cardiac pacemaker, is an implanted medical device that generates electrical pulses delivered by electrodes to one or more of the chambers of the heart. Each pulse causes the targeted chamber(s) to co ...

.Terrorist Abdul Karim Tunda gets a Pacemaker at AIIMS
biharprabha.com. Accessed 30 August 2024.

References