NEW DELHI: The ongoing questioning of Tahawwur Rana, a key conspirator of 26/11, is likely to go beyond the 2008 attack and extend to other Lashkar-e-Taiba terror plots, including the 2004 foiled suicide attack on Narendra Modi, the then chief minister of Gujarat who is now the country’s Prime Minister.
NIA investigators are looking to grill Rana on the Gujarat module as he had joined LeT around the time when the suicide attack was foiled. They believe Rana might spill the beans on insiders who played a role in the plot to kill Narendra Modi in 2004.
On June 15, 2004, the Gujarat Police stated that Ishrat Jahan, along with three other people, had been gunned down near Ahmedabad by a police team belonging to the Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) of the Ahmedabad City Police. The four were on a mission to kill the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
There are strong reasons for NIA interrogators to believe that Rana may have got crucial information related to the Ishrat Jahan-led assassination plot from his friend and LeT associate David Coleman Headley, who was an active operative for the Pakistan-based terror group around 2004.
Headley, who joined LeT a few years before Rana did, had confirmed before US law enforcers that Ishrat Jahan was a part of LeT who was tasked to assassinate Narendra Modi.
While the Ishrat Jahan-led assassination bid was foiled in 2004, Headley later joined Pakistani-Canadian Rana to plot the 2008 Mumbai attack that left 166, including six US nationals, dead.
Apart from questioning Rana on 26/11, NIA investigators hope to extract crucial information from him on LeT’s multiple plots and sleeper cells - active in the pre-2014 era – including the Ishrat Jahan module.
Immediately after the Ishrat Jahan module was neutralised in Gujarat in 2004, there was an alleged attempt by the then UPA government to brand the incident as a “fake encounter” and use it as a handle to settle political scores with then Gujarat Chief Minister Modi.