A man who brought the Pakistani capital to a standstill last month by opening fire near parliament was trained in a LeT camp and helped recruit Indian youths for the banned terror group in the Middle East.
Malik Sikandar Hayat, 50, was arrested after he drove to a boulevard in the heart of Islamabad on August 15 and began firing with two locally made automatic weapons. Even before he was arrested, Pakistani media had reported his links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Hayat was motivated to join the LeT after watching a video made by the terror group while living in a Middle Eastern country in 1996. He receive "initial orientation training" at a LeT centre near a mosque in that country, The News daily quoted an intelligence report as saying.
Though the newspaper did not name the Middle Eastern country, several reports in the Pakistani media have said that Hayat lived in the UAE for many years.
The LeT centre was managed by two Pakistani nationals and Hayat met senior LeT leaders Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, Abdul Rehman Makki and Rasheed Turrabi in 1996.
In 1998-99, Hayat came to Pakistan and did a three-month training at LeT's Al-Aqsa Camp at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. At the time, the camp was run by Commander Saifullah Qasoori, currently based in Karachi.
Hayat visited the camp four to five times for short courses. After the training, he went back to the Middle Eastern country where he lived with his Arab wife, Fatima.
It was during this period that he again met Makki and other LeT activists. Hayat has confessed to Pakistani officials that his main assignment during those days was to recruit youths from India, arrange their travel to Muzaffarabad for training on fictitious identities and launch them back into India.
He was assisted by four travel agents, including Pakistani national Mahboob, who ran a travel agency. Abdul Razzaq from the Indian city of Hyderabad was the focal person who coordinated with Hayat for training and launching LeT activists.
Hayat claimed he and other cadres "launched 50 to 60 LeT activists into India" but did not disclose their identities.
