Mumbai suspect said to be police officer

SRINAGAR, India | One of the two Indian men arrested for illegally buying mobile-phone cards used by the gunmen in the Mumbai attacks was a counterinsurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission, security officials said Saturday, demanding his release.

The arrests, announced in the eastern city of Calcutta, were the first since the bloody siege ended. But what was touted as a rare success for India’s beleaguered law enforcement agencies quickly turned sour as police in two Indian regions squared off against each another.

Senior police officers in Indian Kashmir, which has been at the heart of tensions between India and Pakistan, demanded the release of the officer, Mukhtar Ahmed, saying he was one of their own and had been involved in infiltrating Kashmiri militant groups.

Indian authorities said they believe that the banned Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has links to Kashmir, trained the gunmen and plotted the attacks that left 171 people dead after a three-day rampage through Mumbai that began Nov. 26.

The implications of Mr. Ahmed’s involvement - that Indian agents may have been in touch with the militants and perhaps supplied the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards used in the attacks - added to the growing list of questions over India’s ill-trained security forces, which have been widely criticized for failing to thwart the attacks.

Earlier Saturday, Calcutta police announced the arrests of Mr. Ahmed and Tauseef Rahman, who is said to have bought SIM cards by using fake documents, including identification cards of dead people. The cards allow users to switch their cellular service to phones other than their own.

Mr. Rahman, of West Bengal state, later sold them to Mr. Ahmed, said Rajeev Kumar, a senior Calcutta police officer.

Both men were arrested Friday and charged with fraud and criminal conspiracy, Mr. Kumar said, adding that police were still investigating how the 10 gunmen obtained the SIM cards.

But the announcement had police in Srinagar, the main city in Indian-controlled Kashmir, fuming.

We have told Calcutta police that Mr. Ahmed is “our man and it’s now up to them how to facilitate his release,” said one senior officer speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information. Other police officials in Kashmir supported his account.

The officer said Mr. Ahmed was a special police officer (SPO), part of a semiofficial counterinsurgency network whose members are usually drawn from former militants. The SPO is run on special funding from the federal Ministry of Home Affairs.

“Sometimes we use our men engaged in counterinsurgency ops to provide SIM cards to the [militant] outfits so that we track their plans down,” the officer said.

Police said Mr. Ahmed was recruited to the force after his brother was killed five years ago, reportedly by Lashkar-e-Taiba militants for being a police informer.

About a dozen Islamic militant groups have been fighting in Kashmir since 1989, seeking independence from mainly Hindu India or a union with Muslim-majority Pakistan.

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