When 11 Tablighi Jamaatis turned out to be Israeli Mossad Agents
Feroze Mithiborwala
On January 12 Indian intelligence officials in Calcutta detained 11 foreign nationals for interrogation before they were to board a Dhaka-bound Bangladesh Biman flight. They were detained on the suspicion of being hijackers. “But we realised that they were tabliqis (Islamic preachers), so we let them go,” said an intelligence official. They had planned to attend an Islamic convention near Dhaka, but Bangladesh refused them visa. Later, seeminglyunder Israeli pressure, India allowed them to fly to Tel Aviv.
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“They had landing permits at Dhaka, but that’s not visa,” said a diplomat in the Bangladesh High Commission in Delhi. “We decided not to entertain them anymore because we cannot take chances.”
The eleven had Israeli passports but were believed to be Afghan nationals who had spent a while in Iran. They had secured landing permits for Dhaka and one-way tickets on Bangladesh Biman’s Calcutta-Delhi route through a Delhi-based travel agency.
“We have a right to deny travel facility to a passenger even if he has a valid ticket on security grounds,” said a Bangladeshi Biman official who did not want to be named. To the Bangladesh Biman officials the eleven, who were all Muslims, appeared “too murky”.
Indian intelligence officials, too, were surprised by the nationality profile of the eleven. “They are surely Muslims; they say that they have been on tabligh (preaching Islam) in India for two months. But they are Israeli nationals from the West Bank,” said a Central Intelligence official.
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