Nagpur: The Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative and former national secretary of banned Popular Front of India (PFI), Afsar Pasha, who is now in the custody of Nagpur police, was trained at a terrorist camp near Dhaka in Bangladesh, according to a report in a local English daily.
On Monday, Pasha was interrogated by multiple security and intelligence agencies at length. Pasha, who had urged Jayesh Kantha to threaten Union Minister Nitin Gadkari twice for money, was brought to the city from Belagavi jail in Karnataka on Saturday last week.
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27 June 2025
During interrogation, it came to fore that Pasha had visited Nagpur twice in the past and was having a local network too. He was trying to rope in some instigated youngsters in PFI and later recruit them for LeT missions across India. He had recruited Jayesh for LeT missions while their stay in Belagavi jail.
NIA, ATS, IB grill Afsar Pasha for six hours:
Officials of National Investigation Agency (NIA), Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), and Intelligence Bureau (IB) questioned Bengaluru terror attack case convict Afsar Pasha for around six hours on Monday. The officials grilled Pasha to ascertain details about his Nagpur tour in the past. Pasha was brought to Nagpur from Belagavi (Karnataka) jail by the Dhantoli police in connection with the threatening phone calls to Union Minister Nitin Gadkari.
A senior police official said that the officials of the agencies questioned Pasha for more than six hours. However, Pasha did not reveal much about his past plans to the agencies. Pasha had reportedly come to Nagpur in 2003-04. The agencies are, therefore, trying to connect the dots between the threat phone calls made to Gadkari and his tour to Nagpur. Prima facie, the investigators are suspecting that Pasha had come by a train and had stayed in Central Nagpur during his Nagpur tour. In 2005, Pasha was involved in a terror attack at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bengaluru.
The terrorists had opened fire at the delegates emerging from an international conference at the IISc on December 28, 2005, killing Prof Munish Chandra Puri, a retired professor of IIT Delhi, and injuring four others. Later, the court convicted Pasha and four others in 2011 and handed down life imprisonment to them. Since then, Pasha did not come to Nagpur.
According to police, Jayesh Pujari alias Kantha had planned and made the threat calls to Gadkari’s office after colluding with Pasha. It may be mentioned here that Pujari had made a threat call to Gadkari’s public relations office on January 14, demanding Rs 100 crore. He had claimed to be a member of Dawood Ibrahim gang. At that time, he was lodged in the Belgavai jail. He made another call on March 21, threatening to harm Gadkari if Rs 10 crore were not paid to him.
Pujari was arrested and brought to Nagpur on March 28 this year from a jail in Belagavi, and two cases were registered under provision of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act at Dhantoli police station.
