Lashkar Militants arrested in UP ?

Some interesting observations from the many stories that hit the wires across the mainstream media on the so called “major breakthrough” in cases of terror strikes on a CRPF camp in Rampur and IISc in Bangalore.

The first story appears from the PTI, the TOI carried it with a time stamp of 8:00am IST from Lucknow.

Central security agencies and Uttar Pradesh police on Sunday arrested six suspected LeT militants (see video) from two places in the state as they were planning to move out to Mumbai – their next target

The story says that first on saturday night:

Three Lashkar-e-Toiba militants – Suhail and Arshad Ali alias Baba, both residents of UP, and Fayheem, a Pakistani national – were arrested from a state roadways bus in Rampur when they were planning to go to Mumbai

Then on sunday morning

In Lucknow, three militants – Sallahuddin, a resident of Madhubani in Bihar, and Imran and Farooq, both from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) – were nabbed when they were trying to leave the city

The CNN-IBN nearly 8 hours later at around 3pm has more on the story

The STF claims they found passports, maps of Mumbai and railway tickets to Mumbai on those six men. Two AK-47s, 5 grenades and a pistol were also recovered during the arrest

The next significant version appears on Times News Network just past midnight this time with more details

In Lucknow, additional DG (law and order) and STF, Brij Lal, said Mohammed Shareef has confessed he had attended LeT training camps in Pakistan in 2001-02.

It was Shareef who had collected the firearms and handed them over to the arrested Abu Zaar, Abu Sama and Sabauddin when they reached Rampur. In fact, on January 1, he had led the three to the Rampur CRPF centre.

But themost interesting storyy on the timelines of arrests comes from this story carried by India Abroad News Service.

The first arrest was made from Munda Pandey town in Shahjahanpur district around midnight, the spokesman said.

So if the first arrest was around midnight it must be reasonable to assume atleast a couple of hours would have passed before meaningful leads were obtained from any interrogation.

Following the leads he provided, two more arrests were made from the Rampur bus station

Assuming this happened between 2am and 4am it gives you another couple of hours to nab the rest.

The remaining three were nabbed from Charbagh area in Lucknow Sunday

The original press release from PTI, not a flash but a very detailed one if you remember was out in the Times of India at 8am.

So basically you have 2 hours early morning on a Sunday to not just interrogate suspects across 3 cities to not just get them to confess to immideate crimes (attack on CRPF in Rampur) but to also get them to confess to the IISC Bangalore attack from many years ago and get all of these drafted into a detailed press release to hit the wires before daybreak.

That must make for an incredibly efficient Uttar Pradesh police or is there more ?

As Nitin points out we may have to wait for B. Raman or Praveen Swami to get the inside story on this one.

Offstumped Bottomline:Confessions extracted from suspects within a few hours?of arrests?are bound to dent the credibility of anti-terror operations. There needs to be a federally accepted standard operating procedure for anti-terrorism operations that can stand up to scrutiny and lends an air of credibility to pre-empt the usual suspects who raise the bogey of human rights violations. All the more reason for creating a separate Federal Agency to deal with Terrorism

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