September 30, 2002	Monday	Rajab 22, 1423

BANGALORE, Sept 29: Police said they shot dead five suspected militants here on Sunday who were plotting to assassinate India’s Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani and other Hindu leaders.

Imam Ali, 32, one of the prime accused in the 1993 bombing of a regional office of the rightwing Hindu outfit Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), was among those killed in a raid on a house, police said.

Bangalore police chief H.T. Sangliana told a press conference that the raid was carried out between 2:00 am and 3:30 am Sunday jointly by police commandos from southern Tamil Nadu and Karnataka states.

Police said 13 policemen sustained minor injuries during the raid and five militants, one of them a 23-year-old woman, were killed in the ensuing gunbattle.

“It was culmination of information collected by the Tamil Nadu police. One prime accused Imam Ali has been organizing a gang indulging in various anti-social activities, murder, robbery and manufacture of explosives,” Sangliana said.

Ashutosh Shukla, deputy inspector general of police of Coimbatore district in Tamil Nadu, who took part in the raid, said Ali had been planning to assassinate top Hindu leaders.

“We have information that Ali was planning to go to Allahabad (in northern Uttar Pradesh state) and was plotting to kill the deputy prime minister, the human resources minister (Murali Manohar Joshi) and Ashok Singal (chief of the World Hindu Council),” Shukla said.

“The police were tracking his movements. Ali and his members reached Bangalore two months ago,” he said.

Ali, described by police as a “most wanted Muslim extremist” and carrying a reward of Rs 500,000 on his head had received training in Kashmir from the Hizbul Mujahideen militant group, Shukla said.

Along with another militant, Hyder Ali, he had escaped from police custody near Madurai, in Tamil Nadu, in a daring pre-planned operation on March 7 this year while being transferred to court in the southern town of Kovilpatti.

A senior intelligence officer said Ali was considered to be the most wanted Muslim militant in Tamil Nadu.

“Ali was a hardcore terrorist and the main brain who built the cadre of AL Umma (a banned militant outfit in Tamil Nadu),” the officer said.

He said the police had reliable information that before the RSS headquarters bomb attack in 1993, Ali had “gone across to Pakistan and got training in weapons there”.

He was an expert in making and handling explosives and had links with “Muslim terror networks across the country”, the officer said.—AFP