9/11 attacks partially funded from India: Delhi’s ex-top cop

Says money was raised from kidnapping

In a startling revelation, the former police commissioner of New Delhi has claimed that some of the funds for the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade towers in New York had originated from India.

Neeraj Kumar, who served in India’s premier civil investigation agency Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) before retiring as Delhi’s police commissioner two years ago, made the revelations in a new book focussing on terror events after the 1993 Bombay bomb attacks.

Claiming that the information had been disclosed by Harkatul Mujahideen terrorist Asif Raza Khan during questioning, Kumar says part of $100,000 ransom received from the kidnapping of Partha Pratim Roy Burman, chairman of Khadim shoes, had been shared with the 9/11 attackers.

“…boss Aftab Ansari had shared the ransom money collected in the kidnapping of Partha Pratim Roy Burman, chairman-cum-managing director of Khadim Shoes with Omar Sheikh,” Kumar quoted Khan.

Sheikh, who had been released by India in exchange for the hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1999, had in turn handed over the money to the chief 9/11 attacker Mohammad Atta.

Ansari was responsible for the attack on the American Cultural centre in Kolkata. He is currently on death row in West Bengal for the attack.

“Part of the ransom money received in the Burman kidnapping — about USD 100,000 (at the time INR4.9 million)— had later found its way from Omar Sheikh to Mohammad Atta, the chief of the 9/11 attackers,” Kumar claims in his book, according to Times of India.

Currently heading the anti-corruption wing of BCCI, Kumar says Khan’s account has been quoted in the testimony of John S Pistole, the then deputy assistant director of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) counter-terrorism division. The testimony had been presented before the Senate Committee on Terrorist Financing in July 2003.

Kumar recounts a number of operations during his career, plans, bureaucratic wrangling and his telephonic conversations with India’s most wanted terrorist Dawood Ibrahim in his tell-all book.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 19^th, 2015.