Headley recce fallout: two men arouse suspicions near BARC

Mumbai, Jan 19 (PTI) Two men entered the area around
Bhaba Atomic Research Centre and fed inputs on road topography
into their wireless communication service GPRS arousing
suspicions of people against the backdrop of US terror suspect
David Headley having reportedly conducted a recce there.

People in Anu Shakti Nagar, an area where families of

BARC reside, got suspicious about the activity of the two men

on the fringes of the country's high security atomic research

facility in Trombay near here recently and handed them over to

police.

Later, the duo turned out be two employees who were

conducting a survey on behalf of Survey of India's office but

without a proper sanction, official sources said today.

Police registered a case against the two for alleged

trespassing and misrepresenting the facts and later released

on bail after they produced a letter from Survey of India's

Dehradun office showing that they had been assigned to conduct

a survey of the area, the sources said.

The two persons hailing from a private firm in Bangalore

were hired by the Survey of India for conducting survey work

but the letter given had no clear instructions for them to

conduct a survey inside the Anu Shakti Nagar.

Areas around sensitive installations are marked and are

usually not shown on any maps but in this case directions and

names of roads were being fed into General Packet Radio

Service (GPRS) which in turn could have been connected with a

private server.

The people in the area were already in a state of caution

after it was reported that Headley had conducted a detailed

survey of the area and that BARC could be one of the terror

targets.
While tracing Headley's movements in Mumbai,
investigators had found that he had conducted a proper
reconnaissance of not only BARC but also of some Bollywood
studios in the north-eastern suburb of the city.
49-year-old Headley, who has been under arrest in the US
since October three last year, had travelled to Chembur and
Trombay in the city several times and filmed the exit and
entry points of BARC besides the movement of employees,
investigators said.
The terror suspect, who has been charged by the FBI with
being part of the conspiracy in 26/11 Mumbai attacks, had also
taken video shots of the nuclear facility by hiring a boat
from Gateway of India. The rear side of the BARC, located on a
hill top, can be seen from the Arabian Sea.
The investigators also comprising officials of National
Investigation Agency (NIA), probing the role of Headley and
his Pakistani-Canadian accomplice Tahawwur Rana in India,
suspect that during his boat ride, the Pakistani-American may
have surveyed the mangroves located near the coastline.
The security around the nuclear installation has been
tightened and efforts were on to ensure proper cover in the
mangroves, the sources said.
Security of the cold storage plant of National Thermal
Power Corporation (NTPC) in the area was also being reviewed
as the security agencies were apprehensive that while filming
BARC, Headley may have conducted recce of it as well. The
terror suspect is known to have been trained by Pakistan-based
terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in the clandestine filming
of vital installations. PTI SKL
RDM