Irfan Ahmed's pontification on journalistic principles (Response, June 2001) is not backed by exposure of new facts or points of analysis. His dismissive attitude towards the bombings must have blown up in his face in view of the latest bomb attack at Narayangunj, where an explosion ripped through an Awami League office killing 22 people and injuring over a hundred including the local Awami League MP. The huge bomb of Kotalipara had "military origins" according to Ahmed, but how is he so sure it was not planted by Islamic terrorists? If he accuses me of using intelligence sources who I cannot name because that would jeopardise their jobs, can I not accuse Ahmed of using "foreign experts" who could obviously be named but have not been named.
Bombings by Islamic terrorists have been rampant in the entire arc between the West Asia, erstwhile Soviet Central Asia, even China, all the way to India and Bangladesh and beyond. What objective evidence can Ahmed provide to prove that the Kotalipara bomb was not planted by Islamic terrorists like Harkat ul Jehad—unless of course he is keen to shield them. I am astounded by Ahmed's assertion that the "Breda conspiracy has disappeared from Dutch papers". It was never reported in the Dutch papers in the first place.
But I have the transcript of the conversation between two ISI officials, one sitting in Brussels after the meeting at Breda and the other, his boss, in Karachi. When I broke this story in the Sunday Times, the Pakistanis did not contest it. Just as they had greeted the transcript of the conversation between General Pervez Musharraf, while on a visit to China with his chief of staff, Lt General Aziz at the peak of the Kargil war. I have the expertise to pick the wheat from the chaff. I have exposed many a conspiracy of intelligence agencies of my own country—one has only to read my book Insurgent Crossfire to get an accurate account of the RAW's involvement in fuelling the insurgency in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. No Bangladeshi, I can challenge, can match the depth of my expose on that issue—unless all they do is speculate. But I have contacts in Indian and other intelligence agencies of this region and have very often got my facts crosschecked by playing off one's version against another's. That is where the skills of the reporter come into play. My recent exposure of how Indian military intelligence betrayed the leading Arakanese rebel group in Burma has upset many of our top brass but should I care? After all, in India, reporters are not afraid of taking on the military-security establishment, unlike our colleagues in Bangladesh.
I can only say that I have hard information on the conspiracy to kill Sheikh Hasina. Last year, the Mujibkillers managed to get the LTTE to agree to perform a suicide bombing on her for ten million dollars. The money was to reach the LTTE through an Indian software magnate who was bumped off by Indian intelligence and the money stayed frozen in his account without reaching the LTTE, who then backed off in the absence of payment. I have two reports—one of the Indian Intelligence Bureau and the other of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) of Bangladesh— on how this conspiracy was foiled. These are original reports feretted out through painstaking effort, not plants offered over a bottle of whisky. I got some of my BBC colleagues in South Asia to check the details of these reports. They testified to their accuracy in terms of names, places, activities.