A New Terror Threat?

Wit

hin hours of the Oct. 29 triple bombing that killed 62 and injured 210 in New Delhi, Indian security services fingered Lashkar-e-Toiba ("Army of the Pure"), a Pakistan-based militant group with links to al Qaeda. On Nov. 10, authorities arrested Tariq Ahmed Dar, a Kashmiri toiletries salesman whom authorities have accused of masterminding the attacks for LeT, and last week announced the arrest of two more men from the Kashmiri capital Srinagar. If the arrests aren't surprising, they are no less troubling.

Out of all the Islamic militant groups in Pakistan—Osama bin Laden and friends excepted—LeT causes the most concern in intelligence circles. The group rose to prominence after 1989 when Pakistani mujahedin who had defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan turned their sights on the Indian-administered part of Muslim-dominated Kashmir. Terror scholar Rohan Gunaratna calls the LeT and al Qaeda as "associate groups" who trained together in al Qaeda's Afghan camps. But al Qaeda has also encouraged the LeT to think beyond Kashmir, he says, and strike at India's heart—New Delhi and the major cities.

The LeT have since staged a series of headline-grabbing attacks across India, including a December 2001 assault on the Parliament building in New Delhi that drove India and Pakistan to the brink of war. Indian police say Dar told his interrogators the group planned up to eight more strikes in the capital, including one on the city's new metro system.

The LeT are also making their presence felt further afield. Since 9/11, LeT-trained operatives have been arrested as far away as London and Virginia. Australian police say it was their investigation into suspected French LeT trainee Willie Brigitte, deported from Sydney to Paris in June 2004, which led to the arrest earlier this month of 18 people in Sydney and Melbourne on suspicion of planning terrorist attacks. Documents seized with several of the men also pointed to links with the LeT. "Lashkar is a Pakistan-based group with a specific focus on Kashmir and India," Gunaratna tells TIME. "But more and more we are seeing the LeT establish a significant presence in Australia, Europe and the U.S. And some of those LeT cells have become operational."

Another country where LeT fighters are showing up is Iraq. Gunaratna says Pakistanis now form the biggest group of foreign fighters there, with a handful now in U.S. custody. And a senior Indian intelligence officer tells TIME that LeT is facilitating the periodic transport of groups of 25 to 40 trainees—mainly Pakistanis, but also some Uzbeks, Chechens and Georgians—from its camps to fight in Iraq. The recent use on Indian soil of terror methods common in Iraq, such as suicide attacks and car bombing, may point to a "knowledge transfer" of tactics by fighters returning from the Middle East. Gunaratna said the "blowback" effect of Iraq into other theaters was so far "very limited" and confined to Afghanistan. "But the Iraq spill-over could become something very significant," he cautioned.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has vowed to stamp out the LeT. But the group's bases in northern Pakistan are still operational, LeT leaders still surface to speak at fundamentalist rallies and the Delhi attacks came at a time when the LeT, working under its alternative name of Jamaat ud-Dawa, is gaining legitimacy in Pakistan for its relief operations in the wake of the Oct. 8 earthquake. All of which make the job of cracking down on the group difficult indeed. "Ideologically, the LeT is close to al Qaeda and global jihad," says Gunaratna. "And slowly, very slowly, it's moving in the direction of becoming an international terror group."