Lucknow, Dec. 26 :     Uttar Pradesh had sounded a terror alert in three intelligence reports sent to the Union home ministry since September, indicating a major Harkat-ul-Ansar drive to mobilise and recruit Muslim youth from madrasas and other religious institutions in Deoband, Lucknow and Azamgarh. These reports, accessed by The Telegraph, also stated that ?Harkat-ul-Ansar has stepped up its activities in Uttar Pradesh? and is using it as one of its major bases outside Kashmir. The state government had also tipped off the Centre on the Harkat?s planned strikes on major political leaders, including home minister L.K. Advani and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, following which their security was intensified. At least 10 of Sonia?s election meetings were struck off her schedule. The reports note that since 1993-94, it was the first time that Harkat activists were asked to tour different parts of India, including west Uttar Pradesh, to look for safe houses and cultivate local contacts. In 1993-94, Mohammad Masood Azhar, whose release the hijackers of the Indian Airlines aircraft are demanding, assigned a similar task to a Pakistani, Farooq Bihari alias Sayeed, and one Nazar-ul-Ullah, Harkat ?secretaries?. According to police and intelligence sources, the Uttar Pradesh angle to the Harkat?s growth is crucial in understanding the spread of the Kashmiri militants? network. ?That is why we stressed in our reports that important functionaries of the Harkat were ?motivated and trained? within Uttar Pradesh because Kashmir was getting too hot.? Three middle-level Harkat militants from Deoband, an important religious centre in western Uttar Pradesh and headquarters of the Deobandi sect, were sent to Pakistan in 1993 by Azhar. The three activists, who were motivated in Deoband by Azhar?s men, are Faizul Wahid, alias Abu Dawood Amin originally from Jammu, Nurul Karim and Shamshul Islam. They were involved in the kidnapping of British nationals in September-October 1994 under the leadership of Umar Sayeed Sheikh, who held a British passport. The details tumbled out after Sheikh was arrested in Ghaziabad, in west Uttar Pradesh, on October 31, 1994. Senior police officials point out that often the Harkat connection has been established after chance arrests and encounters. In October 1994, Khurshid Ahmed, a student of the Nadwa college in Lucknow, was killed in an encounter at Saharanpur, also in west Uttar Pradesh. One of his accomplices told the police that Ahmad was asked to identify local carriers of weapons, which the Harkat smuggled in from Kathmandu through Lucknow, and then despatched to other parts of north India. The reports say that Azhar first entered the Kashmir valley in 1993 to supervise the smooth merger of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami. The former functioned in Sind and North West Frontier Province and the latter in Punjab and Baluchistan, the four provinces of Pakistan.