Kamal Ghorui
NEW DELHI: Delhi Police special cell has arrested Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Shabbir Ahmed Lone from near Bangladesh border, sources said. Lone was running a Lashkar cell from his hideout near Dhaka. The operation, monitored closely by police commissioner Satish Golcha, was the result of a cat-and-mouse chase of two months. A special team led by additional CP Pramod Kushwaha, ACP Lalit Negi and inspector Sunil Rajain had been tracking Lone after his role emerged in recruitment of youths for terrorist activities in Delhi, Kolkata and Tamil Nadu.
Lone was earlier arrested by Delhi Police on terror charges in 2007. He fled to Bangladesh after getting bail in 2019 and had become a headache for the security agencies and Delhi’s ATS after it emerged that he had set up a terror cell in that country.
However, he is not the only terror kingpin with Delhi links who the agencies are after.
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Besides Lone, the agencies are now aggressively trying to locate Sheikh Sajjad Gul who was arrested from Nizamuddin station in Delhi in 2002 and was lodged in Tihar for over a decade after being convicted in 2003. He was sentenced to 10 years before being released in 2017. Gul also fled to Pakistan around the same time and is now at the helm of Lashkar’s new face, The Resistance Front (TRF), which has been behind several terror strikes including the Pahalgam attack.
