NEW DELHI: A declassified document recovered from Osama bin Laden‘s Abbottabad hideout described the 2008 Mumbai attack as a “heroic Fidai operation”. A year before the attack, al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri made a clandestine visit to Islamabad to confer with the outfit’s former leader Osama. The meeting was arranged by Hafiz Abdul Rehman Makki, who died of a reported heart attack in Lahore early on Friday.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa said Makki was undergoing treatment for “high blood pressure” at a hospital there. The perpetrator of numerous terr attacks, also brother-in-law of Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed, Makki’s notoriety fetched him the tag of “global terrorist“. As the chief fundraiser for Lashkar, Makki’s role was pivotal not only in orchestrating the 26/11 attacks, which claimed 166 lives. His terror rapsheet included several attacks, such as the one on Red Fort in 2000. Unlike other terrorists who like working on their own, Makki believed in forging collaborations, even with those following a different school of fanaticism.
His alliances with Taliban founder Mullah Omar and other key figures in the terror hierarchy only served to amplify his agenda. Makki’s meetings with al-Zawahiri, Osama and other connected intermediaries along the Af-Pak border between 2005 and 2007 laid the groundwork for a series of devastating attacks. The 2007 meeting between al-Zawahiri and Osama, orchestrated by Makki, was a chilling precursor to the horrors that would unfold in Mumbai a year later.
Last year, the UN Security Council placed him on its sanctions list, prompting him to go into a life of self-imposed exile. “As Makki, a resident of Muridke, spearheaded fundraising operations for Lashkar, he forged robust alliances with Mullah Omer, prompting the US to recognise the threat he posed. Between 2005-10, Makki convened multiple India-focused meets on the Af-Pak border with Omar, al-Zawahiri and other conduits, drawing the attention of India’s external intelligence agency,” a top intelligence officer said.
Makki also cultivated a pseudonym, taught at a university in Saudi Arabia, and authored a book distinguishing fidayeen operations from suicide attacks, reads a dossier on him. Makki’s reported demise brings to a close a chapter in the complex web of global terrorism, but his legacy as a mastermind of mayhem will continue to haunt.