Pakistan concerned over exposure of ISI terror activity in Sri Lanka

A report from Sri Lanka has exposed Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence's (ISI's) use of the island nation for promoting its terror activities worldwide, and alarm bells are ringing within the Pakistan establishment, as they see this as the end of an importation operations hub.

According to Ceylon Today, a Sri Lankan Daily newspaper the ISI has used the Lashkar-e-Taiba and its charitable wing, the Idara Khidmat-e-Khalq (IKK), as proxies to radicalise Sri Lankan Muslims.

In 2004, when the tsunami struck parts of Sri Lanka, the Let-IKK contingent visited Sri Lanka and Maldives under the cover of a humanitarian charitable effort to look for Jihadi recruits.

The report reveals that many youth from these areas headed to Pakistan and were found in LeT training camps in Pakistan's Punjab province and in the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Using Sri Lanka as a staging post, the ISI's primary and apparent objective is to encircle India from all sides. It wanted to use the island nation to access south India, both in terms of finding terror networks as well as for recruitment of cadres.

The Sri Lankan media report also reveals that in June 2009, the activities of Maulana Umar Madani were uncovered. Prior to his arrest in India, Madani was a frequent traveler to Sri Lanka. Madani, a close confidant of JuD Chief Hafiz Saeed and Abdul Rahman Makki, was developing a network in eastern Sri Lanka's Muslim areas.

It has also been exposed that the ISI used Colombo as a transit point for terror funding for smuggling fake Indian currency notes.

Further, a recent report in the Colombo Gazette has highlighted continued attempts of groups like Al Qaeda, to recruit cadres from Sri Lanka, for the jihad in Syria. Such activities have also led to greater cooperation between intelligence agencies of the world's major powers.

After intelligence sharing between India, Sri Lanka and China a Pakistan national, Faiz Muhammad, was arrested recently in Guangzhou, China, with fake Indian currency notes of Rs. 2.5 million from Pakistan, according to the Colombo based report.

Faiz's arrest was the result of a tip-off by Indian intelligence agencies to their counterparts in Colombo and Beijing.