Author: AFX
Publication: Forbes.com
Date: November 14, 2005
URL: http://www.forbes.com/work/feeds/afx/2005/11/14/afx2333635.html
The suspected mastermind behind a series of blasts that killed 62 people in New Delhi markets last month is better known as a successful international drug company executive and family man, newspaper reports said.
Tariq Dar, a suspected member of Pakistan-based Islamic militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, was arrested in the Indian Kashmir summer capital of Srinagar Thursday and brought to the capital for questioning, police said.
Dar, who has not been charged, was linked to the blasts at two crowded markets and a bus on Oct 29 through phone taps and bank records, newspaper reports and police said.
The arrest of Dar, a company executive and father who had broken links to a militant group as a teenager, surprised family members and a journalist who interviewed him for a book on Kashmir.
'When I last met him in December 2002, he had just got engaged to be married. He was, like anybody his age, excited about his first love,' recalled journalist Pradeep Thakur in the Times of India.
Dar also used occasionally to write for a Kashmiri magazine called Mount Valley.
Now in his thirties, Dar apparently started out selling creams, bandages and baby oil from town to town until he was promoted and given sales responsibility for the entire Kashmir Valley.
He was in Delhi on Oct 5 to receive a sales excellence award from his company, his wife told reporters.
But police said he was also planning the deadly blasts which wounded 210 people ahead of the major Hindu festival of Diwali.
Police said yesterday that they had noted Dar as a suspect after finding a debit card bill for a hotel stay in the first week of October.
They followed up by reviewing his bank account details which showed a wire transfer of almost 500,000 rupees had been made by a person based in the Middle East days before the blast, police said.
Police said a subsequent tapped mobile phone conversation to Pakistan, during which Dar spoke about the blasts, confirmed their suspicions.
'We've got the transcript of the conversation. After that there wasn't any doubt left in our mind,' an unnamed investigating officer told the Hindustan Times daily.
But Dar's parents still cannot believe his guilt, even though he was an activist for a militant group as a teenager. 'They are falsely implicating my son,' Gulam Qadir, his father, told reporters yesterday.
In 1992 Dar apparently cut his rebel ties, enrolled in a chemistry course in a Srinagar college and was soon on his way to becoming a white-collar executive, the Times of India's Thakur said.
He liked to dress up to go out to eat Kashmiri specialities at local hotels, Thakur said.
But that life crumbled last Thursday when police chased him down in his Maruti Alto car as he drove to Srinagar with a friend.
Police commissioner KK Paul said yesterday that the hunt is now on for four accomplices identified as members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of several groups that has battled Indian rule in Kashmir since 1989 in a conflict that has claimed more than 44,000 lives.
Paul also said police found that Dar made a call to a news agency office in Srinagar to claim that Lashkar had not carried out the bombings. The blasts were claimed by an obscure rebel group.