Bangalore: The Al-Mujahideen militant gang, led by the dreaded Imam Ali that was gunned down in the city on September 29, had plotted to assassinate Deputy Prime Minister, L K Advani and Union Human Resources Minister, Murali Manohar Joshi, a top Tamil Nadu police official disclosed on September 29.

Ali, who was killed in an encounter in the joint operation by Karnataka and Tamil Nadu police early on September 29 morning, along with four others, had made a vain attempt to kill Joshi this July in Ahmedabad, the DIG (Coimbatore), Ashitosh Shukla told reporters. However, Ali could not execute his plot.

The DIG said Advani was also on Ali's hit list.

Ali, an expert in bomb making, had been trained by the Hizbul-Mujahideen in Jammu and Kashmir in 1991 and later, by Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) in Bangladesh in operating sophisticated weapons, including AK-47.

Shukla said the Tamil Nadu police, which missed the gang by a whisker at Thiruvananthapuram on May 10, kept track of its movements.

He said though Ali had planned to visit Allahabad after his abortive assassination mission, he did not do so, but engaged himself in planning to set off bomb blasts in temples in Tamil Nadu to create communal disturbances.

Ali was cooling his heels in jail six years till his escape from Madurai jail while being taken to court in March 2002 and was the mastermind of the RSS office bomb blast in Chennai, which claimed 14 lives, Shukla said.

The gang, according to intelligence information, was in the process of procuring weapons to let loose a reign of terror in the city and parts of Tamil Nadu.

PTI