Before becoming a terrorist organisation Laskhar-e-Toiba member, 71-year-old Abdul Karim Tunda started his career as a carpenter before getting radicalised and carrying out terror attacks.
Tunda was born in 1943 at Chatta Lal Miya, behind Delhite Cinema at Daryaganj in old Delhi before Independence. His father was a metal worker who used to do melt and mould copper, zinc and aluminium at Daryaganj. Soon after his birth, his father along with his family shifted to their native village at Bazaar Khurd in Pilkhua, Ghaziabad.
Tunda started his career as a carpenter and then became a scrap dealer and cloth merchant, and then opened a homeopathic shop before turning, 40 when he became a jehadi.
His younger brother Abdul Malik, who is still a carpenter, is the only immediate family member alive in India. Malik still lives at the same house with his wife and seven children.
His left hand got severed in an accident while he was preparing a bomb and this earned him the feared nickname ‘Tunda’. Tunda, who is closely associated with Laskhar-e-Toiba and Inter-Services Intelligence in Pakistan, was initiated into terrorism by the ISI in early 80s. In March 1985, while Abdul Karim was in Mumbai in connection with his trade, there were communal riots in Bhiwandi.
In Mumbai, Tunda befriended Dr Jalees Ansari, a resident of Mumbai. Both Tunda and Ansari constituted their own tanzeem ‘Tanzeem Islah-ul-Muslimeen’ – Islamic Armed Organization and Organization for the Improvement of Muslims. Another top LeT militant, Azam Ghouri, had joined the tanzeem floated by Ahl-e-Hadis to avenge the Babri Masjid demolition. Tunda and his accomplice Ansari had in 1993 set off a series of explosions in Mumbai and Hyderabad and seven separate bomb blasts on trains. After Ansari’s arrest in January, 1994, Tunda fled to Dhaka.
In Dhaka, Tunda started imparting training to jehadi elements in bomb-making. He also stayed in Pakistan, where he is known to have given training on fabrication of improvised explosive device and other explosives to militants who are sent to India. He returned from Dhaka to India to mastermind the deadly 1996-1998 blasts. In almost all the blasts in Delhi during 1996-98, Tunda’s men, who were from Pakistan and Bangladesh, had detonated bombs using pencil batteries.
The most-devastating of these blasts was in a crowded private bus at Punjabi Bagh in Delhi in December, 1997.