70-year-old Syed Abdul Karim alias Tunda, a Dawood Ibrahim aide and a top 'bomber' of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, is a resident of Pilakhuwa area in Western Uttar Pradesh. He came to be known as 'Tunda' after losing his left arm in a bomb-making process.
A resident of Pikhuwa in Uttar Pradesh's Ghaziabad district, Tunda was one of the 20 terrorists whose extradition India had demanded from Pakistan after the 2001 attack on Parliament House. This list included Lashkar chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed and his Jaish-e-Mohammad counterpart Maulana Azhar Masood Alvi.
Before joining the ranks of the terror outfit, he ran a homoeopathic shop in the early 1980's. After he became a part of the LeT, apart from being an expert in making bombs, Tunda had a major hand in spreading Laskhar-e-Taiba's network outside Jammu and Kashmir. Tunda masterminded many North India bombings from 1996 to 1998.
The CBI had charged Karim with organising LeT's major terror attacks outside of Jammu and Kashmir in a series of 43 bombings in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Rohtak and Jalandhar in which over 20 persons were killed and over 400 injured. SN Srivastava, CP, Special cell during a press briefing in New Delhi also said Tunda had triggered explosions on inter-city trains on December 6, 1993 that claimed two lives. He further said that Tunda returned to India in 1996 via Dhaka route.
The sources say that he was not directly involved in perpetrating bombings after 1998. However, he acted as mentor for a younger generation of Lashkar operatives, financing and organising operations across India.
Post 1997, Tunda shuttled between Karachi, Kenya and West Asia. He travelled from Pakistan to Bangladesh over the past decade.
The hunt for him virtually ended at one point when it was believed that he had been killed in a blast in Bangladesh till he was arrested by Delhi Police from Indo-Nepal border on Saturday after being deported from UAE on identification.
(Additional inputs from PTI and CNN-IBN)
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