Dhaka gossip sparked nationwide panic

New Delhi: Eight weeks ago, an official at India’s High Commission met an informant who had a fantastic story to tell. Lashkar-e-Taiba commanders, the informant claimed, were planning an election-time attack in India intended to mirror in both tactics and scale the September 11, 2001, strikes on New York and Washington, DC. Six pilots — and, for some opaque reason, 30 young women — had been set into India to execute the plot, the informant said.
From the Indian mission in Dhaka, the informant’s story made its way to the Defence Intelligence Agency in New Delhi. Last month, the DIA brought the warning to the Multi Agency Centre — a once-moribund Intelligence Bureau-managed clearing house which has been energised ever since P. Chidambaram’s appointment as Union Home Minister.
Despite its apparently bizarre character, the Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing studied the story with some care. Dhaka had, after all, been a major centre for Lashkar operations.
The Dhaka informant’s report was checked to see if it contained the smallest kernel of truth. Finally, though, both RAW and the IB concluded there was no major new Lashkar plot involving pilots — or, for that matter, young women.
In a note to his superiors, which recorded the substance of the conversation, Assistant Defence Adviser Ajay Patney made clear the informant’s reliability had not been established. He added that there was no evidence to bear out the story.
But bureaucrats at the Union Home Ministry didn’t want to take a chance, and passed on the story to the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS ) regardless.
But on Wednesday, the BCAS circulated a warning to airlines carrying the informant’s bizarre story — but without the crucial caveats. Less than two days after the BCAS warning was issued, embarrassed bureaucrats at the Union Ministry of Home Affairs withdrew it. By that time, though, airline staff and passengers had been panicked by overblown television accounts of the supposedly-imminent terror threat.
The transformation of an unverified scrap of information provided by a dubious source into a full-scale airline terror alert points to an emerging malaise in India’s security system.
04/03/09 Praveen Swami/The Hindu

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Categories: Airports Apr 2009, Safety Apr 2009