PATNA: An attachment notice by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) was put up at the ancestral house of
Lashkar-e-Taiba operative
Mohammad Umar Madni
at his Balkatwa village under Basopatti police station in Madhubani district on Friday evening.
Madni, considered close to Jamat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed, had disappeared soon after he was granted bail by a court in New Delhi in 2009. He was operating from Kathmandu in Nepal before being arrested from Delhi airport in June 2009.
“A two-member team of Enforcement Directorate pasted the proclamation notice at Madni’s house. The notice is related to attachment of his property. The district police helped the ED team,” Madhubani SP Satya Prakash said on Saturday.
Prakash said two ED officials from Patna regional office, who had arrived with the notice issued by the special CBI court in Delhi, put up the notice at Madni’s house which was locked from outside. The SHO of Basopatti police station Indal Yadav said no member of Madni’s family was in the house when the ED team paid a visit to the village on Friday evening.
Local residents told the visiting team that Madni had not visited the house for a long time. He is said to be hiding in Nepal from where he carried out his operation before being arrested in 2009. Basopatti is barely 10 km from the Indo-Nepal border. Intelligence agencies have inputs about Madni’s visit to Kolkata and Darbhanga earlier this year.
Sources in the intelligence agencies said Madni was assigned to recruit youths from
Bihar and send them to Pakistan via Nepal for training to carry out attacks in India.
Intelligence inputs sent to the Union home ministry suggested that Madni was involved in strengthening the base of LeT in Faizabad and Gorakhpur in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. LeT used to provide funds to Madni for strengthening the terror network in bordering districts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. He is said to have shifted his area of operation from Kathmandu to Kapilvastu (Nepal).
Sources said Madni used to visit Madarsas in the bordering districts of Bihar and indoctrinate students to work for ‘Jihad’. Later another terror outfit—Indian Mjuhideen, which carried out serial explosions at Gandhi Maidan in Patna and Bodh Gaya in 2013, made its base in Darbhanga.
At least one dozen youths hailing from Madhubani and Darbhanga districts were arrested by central intelligence agencies for their alleged links with terror outfits. Basopatti was once seen as a hotbed of terror activities in the state.