The Honeybee Conspiracy

Untitled Part 70

Chapter 68

While Shekar Gupta was being interrogated by Kiran and his team, special units of ATS, IB, NSG and Special Armed Forces descended on the hideouts of the sleeper cells spread across the country.

Based on the information given by Abdul, Shahid and a few other LeT operatives captured, the special units swooped down on them. From Chennai, Nagarcoil, Trichy, Madurai, Coimbatore, to Trivandrum, Kannur, Mangalore, Bangalore, Dharwad, Mumbai, Pune, Panvel, Ahmedabad, Surat, Chandigarh, Jharkhand, Bhubaneshwar, Kolkotta, Mizoram, Sikkim. The operation commenced at 11 pm, the team split into 6 groups covering all regions. The action was swift and decisive. No sirens and police vehicles. The Elite Forces swooped down and took them into custody and left. Another group collected the evidence, cleaned the hideouts and left before the neighbors could wake up. JK's orders were clear,news must not go to the media under any circumstances.

In all, 1687 members were rounded up and taken to undisclosed locations for further interrogation. The Navjeevan express bombers who wereamong them were identified during interrogations.All their bodies were never recovered.

The interrogation of Shekar Gupta was now on the 5th day. He denied being a spy even as evidence after evidence was shown to him. Even when JK confronted him with the recording of Abdul's confession, he still denied. After weeks of torture including the use of drugs, he finally admitted that he was indeed Honeybee alias Azim Khan Rehaman Abdullah. Born in Peshawar, he was inducted into the Pakistan army and received training from ISI. After he was deemed ready, he was sent to Lucknow where he enrolled in the Benares University to do his masters Political Science. Here, he was active in the students union and joined the Nationalist Party. He came in direct contact with the top leadership and soon rose his way into the political inner circle. During this period, he enrolled for the IAS and passed out with a 1stclass. His contacts within the Nationalist party ensured he was inducted into the Uttar Pradesh cadre and joined as an Assistant Collector in Shajahanpur. He steadily rose and joined the Central Administrative Service on deputation.and later was posted to the DRDO as Laison Officer. From then on, he had been passing on Intel to Pakistan through a network of agents. For the past twenty years, he had been passing on top-secret highly confidential files to Pakistan as by then, he was the Additional Director – Projects in the Ministry of Defence.

Shekar Gupta, however, seemed to be pretty cold, lacked any kind of guilty feeling and was totally silent on the modus operandi in how he communicated to Iqbal. Even after weeks of sustained third-degree torture, he never gave any information. A few weeks earlier, it was announced that Shekar Gupta had suffered a heart attack and was airlifted to the US for specialized treatment.