Banned Bangladeshi militant outfit Harkat-ul Jihad-e-Islami used to supply grenades to Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayiba to carry out attacks in India, a top HuJI leader has told cops in Dhaka.
HuJI leader Abu Zandal, who was recently arrested, said they had sent several consignments of grenades to Lashkar outfits operating in India until 2004, an unnamed security official was quoted as saying by the Prothom Alo daily.
But the outfit failed to send the last such consignment as the Lashkar representative who was supposed to receive it was killed in an encounter with the Border Security Force near Bangladesh's Kaliganj frontier.
The report said Zandal told the interrogators that slain Lashkar leader Yazdani, who was killed in 2006 by the Delhi Police, used to maintain links with detained HuJI chief Mufti Abdul Hannan.
Bangladesh's elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion had arrested Zandal on February 14.
The newspaper report said Zandal claimed that they used to get the supply of 'Arges grenades' from a fugitive, Maulana Tazuddin, who is believed to be hiding in South Africa.
Police had in January arrested Tazuddin's brother Abdus Salam Pintu, a minister in the previous Khaleda Zia government, for his suspected involvement in August 21, 2004 grenade attack on former premier Sheikh Hasina.
HuJi chief Hannan had earlier confessed to have carried out the attack, but Hasina's Awami League had been alleging that a section of the then premier Zia's BNP was behind it.
