Ten years ago, the capture of a young LeT terrorist who had entered India illegally after crossing the India–Pakistan border had led to a series of revelations and developments that made CTC undertake a classified mission to slip into the heart of LeT’s terror infrastructure in Pakistan and India.

The mission’s objective was twofold: to prevent, neutralize and weaken LeT’s terror attacks in India, and to destroy the Pakistani outfit, the terror mother ship, from within.

2. DAWN ABDUCTION

2

DAWN ABDUCTION

A ten-foot-wide road split off westward from the eight-lane Hyderabad–Mumbai highway to reach Rukhsar Ganj’s three-hundred-year-old Al Aqsa Noorani mosque. A beautiful structure with tall, Prussian-blue minarets and a near-perfect white dome, the mosque was known to fulfil the wishes of a true namazi, a faithful who offers prayers. It was also the lower-middle-class locality’s only claim to fame in a heritage-rich city, where the past coexists with the present. Five times a day, around a hundred faithfuls bustled through its halls and courtyards to offer prayers.

The brick road was narrow, with gaps, but was built like an arrow. Open drains flanked its sides. Two kids, bare bottomed and in white vests, sat on their knees. Two goats, one much smaller than the other and with a pink line across its white-brown fur, were challenging each other, their heads bent and horns clattering noisily. The air was laden with the smell of soil-coated bricks, wet since the previous night’s rains, of the jasmine flowers outside a row of white single-storey houses, and of putrid drain water. The road was the main way of passage in Rukhsar Ganj.

A kilometre ahead, it came to a dead end. To its left stood the Noorani mosque, its campus spread over a rectangular plot of land, with decades-old banyan and tamarind trees standing by waist-high boundary walls.

Diagonally opposite the mosque, across the road, was the single-storey house of Saeed Ali, known as ‘Ali sahab’ locally, the imam of Noorani mosque. Ali’s house was painted white and had a lemon and a tamarind tree outside it.

As the mosque’s prayer leader for the last forty years, Ali was known for his soulful recitation of the holy words praising the Almighty, and for his love for the pious.

Ali counted himself as one of the beneficiaries of the mosque’s divine blessings. To have a lovely daughter like Rahat, a twenty-seven-year-old with a master’s degree in computer applications and a topper throughout, who had got her striking looks and candour from her late mother, was nothing short of a divine blessing for him. But the true confirmation of the fact that he was blessed, Ali would tell his close friends and relatives, lay in the fact that he had a son-in-law like Salim Khwaja Amjad.