Also known to be close to 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed, 70-year-old Tunda, who was holding a Pakistani passport with the name Abdul Quddus, was arrested yesterday at around 3 PM from the Banwasa-Mehendarnagar area on the Indo-Nepal border and brought to Delhi.
Tunda is one of the 20 terrorists India had asked the Pakistan government to hand over after the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack and is suspected to be involved in 40 bombings in the country. He is the first in the list to be arrested.
India's list of wanted terrorists and criminals given to Pakistan includes Saeed, Laskhar-e-Taiba chief, Jaish-e- Mohammed chief Maulana Masood Azhar and Dawood, among others.
Police said Tunda was wanted in 21 cases in Delhi alone that were committed in 1994 and in 1996-1998.
Addressing a press conference here, Special Commissioner of Delhi Police (Special Cell) S N Shrivastava said Tunda was carrying a Pakistani Passport No AC 4413161 issued on 23 January, 2013 in the name of Abdul Quddus.
Tunda had trained young indoctrinated youths in preparing bombs with locally available materials like urea, nitric acid, potassium chloride, nitrobenzene and sugar, and planting them at crowded places to cause maximum casualties, he said.
Before becoming a militant, Tunda had worked as a carpenter, scrap dealer and cloth merchant. His younger brother Abdul Malik (a carpenter) is reportedly the only immediate family member alive in India.
There were conflicting reports over the circumstances in which Tunda was arrested, with one police source claiming that he was deported from a Gulf country.
Another source said that Tunda left Karachi around ten days ago and reached Kathmandu via Dubai.
Intelligence agencies were tracking him from Dubai and gave a tip-off to the Special Cell of Delhi Police, which finally nabbed him yesterday from the Indo-Nepal border.