Security around senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader L K Advani and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was reviewed on Tuesday following intelligence inputs that global terrorist Dawood Ibrahim has been asked by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence to assassinate them.
Rediff.com's Vicky Nanjappa travels to Bhatkal on Karnataka's west coast to investigate how a quaint town turned into a hotspot. Bhatkal has been in the news since the Indian security agencies zeroed in on terror links to this town.
The Pakistani judicial commission investigating the killing of Osama bin Laden has interviewed the al Qaeda leader's widows and daughters for the first time, the panel announced on Wednesday.
The judicial commission probing the killing of Osama bin Laden has recorded the statements of Inter-Services Intelligence officials, who reiterated claims that the US unilaterally conducted the raid against the Al Qaeda leader without the consent of Pakistani authorities.
The Pentagon on Tuesday said it had shared with Pakistan in recent years the indications of Islamabad's "complicity" with extremist groups, renewing top United States commander Admiral Mike Mullen's allegations that Inter-Services Intelligence was conniving with the Haqqani network in Afghanistan.
Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Saturday rejected American accusations linking Pakistan's spy agency Inter Services Intelligence with the Haqqani terror network, saying the allegations reflected "policy disarray" within the United States administration on achieving peace in Afghanistan.
The already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan further deteriorated when Admiral Mike Mullen on Thursday accused the Inter-Services Intelligence agency for supporting the Haqqani network in planning and executing an assault on the US embassy in Afghanistan.
Pakistan military Thursday said it used multiple weapons, including killer drones, to carry out effective strikes against hideouts inside Iran used by militants of two leading Baloch terrorist groups responsible for recent attacks in the country.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the United States joint chiefs of staff, just days before his retirement, has made yet another scathing indictment of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence's perfidy. The spy agency maintains proxies like the Haqqani network for its own strategic depth in Afghanistan, he said.
Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence-sponsored Haqqani Network, responsible for the killings of United States and coalition troops in Afghanistan and widely believed to have been responsible for the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul a few years ago, is on the verge of being designated a Foreign Terrorist Organisation.
In an informal chat, former Intelligence Bureau chief Ajit Doval tells Onkar Singh that Osama Bin Laden's death must have come as a blow to Al Queda. "But if you ask me whether the Islamic radicalism has been badly hit, I would say no."
Such action will be seriously detrimental to national security and should be opposed by public and political opinion, says B Raman
The immediate problem that the Lashkar faces following the crackdown is the supply of arms and other materials to carry out terror strikes. Dawood Ibrahim has been asked to use his existing smuggling channels to send in arms and ammunition.
A lieutenant colonel is facing charges of establishing unauthorised contacts on Facebook with a Bangladeshi woman, suspected to be an Inter Services Intelligence agent, who had earlier honeytrapped an Indian officer in Dhaka last year.
'Many in Pakistan were thinking about taking Saeed from the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and making him the pole around which they would bring in and demilitarise militants and turn them into a political entity in Pakistan.'
Pakistan's Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik on Wednesday rejected Home Minister P Chidambaram's assertion of 'state support' to the terrorists behind 26/11 massacre, saying ISI was a target of 'propaganda campaign'.
Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani today said the ISI has given its "feedback" to India on "some information" about the Mumbai attacks that New Delhi had shared with US intelligence agency CIA.
On a day when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the Mumbai attacks could not have been carried out without the support of official agencies in Pakistan, Intelligence Bureau sources told rediff.com that the Inter-Services Intelligence agency had detailed knowledge about the planning and execution of the November 26 attacks in Mumbai. No terror operation in India is a success unless it is backed by the ISI, the sources added.
The ball is in the Central Intelligence Agency's court if it wants to take its relationship with the Inter-Services Intelligence agency back to the level it was prior to the arrest of United States security contractor Raymond Davis for gunning down two Pakistani men, according to a media report.
Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reported that according to intelligence sources, Ibrahim is a CIA asset, both as a veteran of the mujahedeen war and in a continuing connection with his casino and drug trade operations in Kathmandu.
Investigating agencies claim that the amount of fake currency in India is a shocking Rs 170,000 crore. Reserve Bank of India officials dispute this figure and say that as on July 2008, the total currency available with the Indian public was Rs 603,000 crore and if what the IB is saying is true, then it would mean that 28 per cent of the currency in the country is fake.
After the Shakil Afridi episode, both sides are back to where they were, with ties strained and reconciliatory efforts coming to a standstill, says Amir Mir
Pakistan and its spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence had played a vital role in imparting training to convicts to handle weapons and explosives, which materialised in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, the Supreme Court held.
'I don't see any relationship between them and ex-army or ex-ISI as has been happening in the past,' says strategic analyst Shuja Nawaz, who is convinced the Pakistan army and its intelligence wing, the Inter-Services Intelligence, are not complicit in the Mumbai terror attacks.
Targeting her Marxist opponents again, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee alleged that Communist Party of India-Marxist was plotting with Maoists to kill her with the help of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and financed by North Korea, Venezuela and Hungary.
'If there is a face-off between the army and people, the leadership may lose control of the army.'
Journalists in Pakistan have been permitted to carry small fire arms for self-defence said Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Wednesday. The announcement comes in the wake of the murder of journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad.
A Pakistani-American man has been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on charges of providing material support to terrorists involved in the 2009 suicide attack at the Inter-Services Intelligence headquarters in Lahore that killed 30 people and wounded more than 300 others.
More than 30 Inter-Services Intelligence-backed espionage modules have been neutralised by security agencies across the country in the last three years resulting in arrest of 48 spies, Lok Sabha was informed on Tuesday.
Sources suggest that in the days to come, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence would position Dawood and Ilyas in such a way that they would contribute the worst forms of terror.
United States special envoy Marc Grossman on Thursday met Pakistan's top civil and military leadership as part of efforts to salvage bilateral relations following the covert American operation in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday described as "worrisome" reports that Indian Consulate General in Jalalabad was the target of a terror plot in Afghanistan.
The press briefing seemed a deliberate decision to let the army convey its angst to Imran directly, observes Rana Banerji, who headed the Pakistan desk at RAW, India's external intelligence agency.
The moderate faction of the Hurriyat Conference on Saturday rubbished as a "figment of imagination" the claims made by United States attorney Neil H Macbride that its chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq was controlled by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence. "The statement made by Macbride about the Mirwaiz is his figment of imagination and laughable," Hurriyat said in a statement.
In the wake of the confession by Canadian Pakistani Lashkar-e-Tayiba operative Tahawwur Hussain Rana, the Bhartiya Janata party asked the government to not hold any talks with Pakistan.
Sheikh Hasina, who quit as prime minister and fled Bangladesh, will be back in the country as soon as democracy is restored, his son Sajeeb Wazed Joy said on Thursday and blamed Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI, for fuelling the ongoing unrest in the country.
Maj Hamza of the Inter-Services Intelligence and his assistant Subedar Saeed were killed when their car came under attack in Rashakai area by suspected pro-Taliban militants.
Former Inter-Services Intelligence chief Asad Durrani on admitted in Supreme Court that he had distributed millions of rupees among Pakistani politicians in 1990 on the instructions of then army chief Gen Mirza Aslam Beg and late president Ghulam Ishaq Khan.
The ISI's overwhelming involvement in national politics has weakened the mainstream political parties, given a boost to horse-trading and arrested the growth of the political culture in the country. Amir Mir reports from Islamabad.
Till now, the ISI, the premier external counter-intelligence outfit, was working under the Defence Ministry but Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani relocated the agency by placing it under the Interior Ministry, headed by his adviser Rehman Malik, The News daily said.