Arrested SIMI and Indian Mujahideen Islamic Terrorists Planned to Attack Ayodhya Case Judges

Bhopal, June 9, 2011

Arrested SIMI men planned to attack Ayodhya case judges

Mahim Pratap Singh

Terrorists arrested earlier this week by the Madhya Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad planned to attack judges who delivered the Ayodhya case verdict.

According to police sources, five terrorists of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India and three others belonging to the Indian Mujahideen, who were arrested on Sunday, confessed to researching the disputed land at Ayodhya and surrounding areas following the September 30, 2010 judgment.

“The terrorists told us that they had been researching the area around the site and were planning to target the three judges who delivered the judgment,” ATS Inspector-General Vipin Maheshwari told The Hindu.

Three of the arrested terrorists are reportedly connected to the July 2008 Ahmedabad blasts.

Sources in the Intelligence Bureau said the terrorists also confessed to having robbed five banks in the State to raise funds for organisational and propaganda activities and other operations.

Tamil Muslim Arrested in France for Islamic Terror Connection

Indian Mohammed Niaz Arrested in France SIMI Acitivist – Chidu

New Delhi, May 23: Home minister P Chidambaram said that, Indian national arrested in France on May 10, 2011 is identified as banned SIMI acitivist.

Earlier : India was in touch with French authorities over the arrest of an Indian national, Mohammed Niaz, for suspected al-Qaida links but has so far not sought any consular access. Niaz was among the seven held by French authorities earlier this month for terror links even though the French government refrained from linking them with any specific plant to carry out attacks.

As widely reported earlier, Niaz, an engineer, was arrested from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on May 10 on arrival from Algeria, a day after the other six were held from different areas in Paris. “We made enquiries and French authorities told us that they have an Indian national in their custody. We are in touch with them over the issue,” said Namrata Kumar, counselor with the Indian embassy in France.

After his arrest, French interior minister Claude Gueant had described Niaz as a man with high level of technical training. He was working as a software professional in France and was the main target of the raids which resulted in the arrest of the seven men. Niaz belongs to Madurai. While his mother is said to live in south India, his father shifted to West Asia many years ago.

French authorities are tight-lipped about the charges being pressed against Niaz but it is learnt that his extensive network among the highly radicalized local Muslim community and his frequent trips to Pakistan from Algeria made France’s domestic intelligence agency, DCRI, sit up and take notice. Al-Qaida in Islamic Maghreb, one of the top al-Qaida franchises, is a very potent force in Algeria and has time and again vowed to carry out attacks against France and other western nations. Since the enhanced threat perception in France, the DCRI has been tracking jihadist networks looking to recruit potential bombers in France and send them to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Niaz is also accused of sending two Frenchmen to Pakistan who were arrested in Lahore in January this year.

Report on Modules of SIMI/IM Islamic Terrorists in 8 Indian States

Indian Mujahideen strikes deep

Mon, Feb 22 06:08 AM

Uttar Pradesh

SIMI was formed in Aligarh in 1977 and had thousands of members and offices in almost every district of the state before it was banned by the Centre in 2002. The group came under the radar of intelligence agencies after 1998 and the then SIMI president Dr Shahid Badr Falahi was arrested in Bahraich for an alleged provocative speech days after 9/11.

More than 1,200 SIMI members were arrested from the state after the ban. Police say they have evidence to prove that the SIMI was involved in the February 2005 blasts in Varanasi, the Shramjeevi Express blast in July 2005, the Varanasi blasts of March 2006, and serial blasts in courts in Lucknow, Faizabad and Varanasi in 2007.

Among the prominent members arrested in the state are Abu Bashar of Azamgarh, who is said to have first revealed the existence of IM and its role in blasts across the country, and Shahbaz Ahmed of Lucknow, allegedly involved in the Jaipur blasts. State anti-terrorism squad officials say they are still looking for seven key IM operatives belonging to Azamgarh: Dr Shahnawaz, Ariz Khan alias Junaid, Mohammad Sajid alias Bada Sajid, Mirza Shadab Beig, Mohammad Khalid, Asadullah Akhtar and Salman.

Maharashtra

Mumbai and Pune were the main IM hubs with an extensive network of operatives capable of providing resources for an attack anywhere in the country. The arrests made in 2008 in these two cities laid bare the backbone of the IM. The outfit grew out of the seamy underbelly of Mumbai’s gangland, with Riyaz Bhatkal dabbling in underworld activities before becoming involved in SIMI operations in the Muslim dominated areas of Kurla and Cheetah Camp.

In fact, Riyaz was a suspect in the bomb blasts in Mumbai in 2002 and 2003 and a manhunt was launched for him then. In Pune, IM had set up base in the Kondhwa area, with a control room in an apartment in an upmarket housing society. Mumbai police arrested 21 IM members, including IT engineer Mansoor Peerbhoy, and charged them of forming an organised crime syndicate for terrorist activities and hacking into WiFi accounts to send e-mails claiming credit for bomb blasts.

Among the key missing operatives from the state are Abdus Subhan Qureshi alias Tauqeer, the face of IM in 2008, Amin alias Raja Ayub Shaikh, Abdul Shakoor Khan alias Irfan, Abu Rashid.

Gujarat

The state has been more a target for SIMI-IM than a hub for the groups, with most men blamed for the 2008 blasts belonging to other states. The blasts were allegedly carried out under the direction, guidance and assistance of Harkat-ul-Jehadi-Islam (HuJI) operative Amir Raza Khan from Pakistan.

Gujarat Police took custody of senior SIMI leaders Safdar Nagori and Abdul Sibli from Madhya Pradesh and others were taken into custody from jails elsewhere. So far, 57 people have been arrested for the blasts and 38 named in the conspiracy are at large.

Madhya Pradesh

The strong SIMI network in the state helped IM recruit and train members the way it did in UP. In 2008, 13 SIMI leaders, including the outfit’s general secretary Safdar Nagori and his brother Kamruddin, were arrested following raids in Indore. The police described the arrested as active members from Kerala, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.

The arrested also included SIMI’s Karnataka unit chief Hafiz Hussain and Shibli, the mainstay of the group in Kerala. In April 2008, the police neutralised a SIMI training camp in Choral, a popular holiday spot, 35 km from Bhopal. Qayamuddin Kapadia, suspected to be one of the main conspirators of the Ahmedabad serial blasts, was arrested from the state in November 2008. Last April, IM operative Saif-ur-Rahman was arrested from a train in Jabalpur. The Azamgarh resident is accused of planting bombs in Jaipur and Ahmedabad.

Kerala

Although Kerala has not been an IM target, the state is home to some of its key members and several places hosted secret indoctrination, arms training camps after 2005. According to Gujarat police, 37 hardcore SIMI activists had participated in a bomb-making and tough-terrain training camp in Vagamon in 2007. Aluva, Paravoor and Perumbavoor in Ernakulam district, Erattupetta in Kottayam and old Kannur city are known to have been used by the IM while half-a-dozen men arrested for being linked to Lashkar are from Kannur city.

Prominent among the key SIMI-IM operators from Kerala are C A M Basheer, an aeronautical engineer from Aluva and the former national president of SIMI. Other SIMI leaders from Kerala are Peediyekkal Shibili, his brother Shaduli and Ansar Maulavi. They were arrested in Indore in March 2008. Sarfraz Nawaz, secretary at the SIMI Delhi office, was picked up by the RAW from Muscat last year.

The police had found that Nawaz financed the Bangalore blasts and knew Basheer. Sainudheen alias Satharbhai of Malappuram designed the explosives for Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Surat in 2008. Tadiyantavide Nazeer, who had played a key role in recruiting youth for training at Lashkar camps, was nabbed last November and is suspected to have been with the IM in 2008. Key players absconding from Kerala are C A M Basheer, Ayoob, Ummer Farook and Subaih.

Karnataka

While the Bhatkal brothers, Riyaz Shahbandari and Iqbal Shahbandari, used their coastal hometown of Bhatkal as an IM hub, the activities of the group elsewhere in the state were restricted largely to the northern districts of Bijapur, Bidar and Gulbarga. A spurt in SIMI activities occurred in 2007 when various senior members from Karnataka and Kerala tried to reorganise a hardline version.

While the core group had 25-30 members, the effort to revive the SIMI in 2007 saw training camps being held on the Karnataka-Goa border, in the Hubli-Dharwad region and at Ernakulam in Kerala through 2006-07. Much of the network that emerged during this period was busted by Karnataka police through 2008. The IM members blamed for the Hyderabad and Ahmedabad blasts were trained in a remote village in Chikamagalur district.

Although the IM is not held directly responsible for the July 2008 blasts in Bangalore, Riyaz Bhatkal and the perpetrators of the attack a small group of men from Kerala led by former Kerala SIMI activists obtained integrated chip timers for bombs from a common source. The Bhatkal brothers and the Bangalore bombers used a Hyderabad house as a hideout. Besides the Bhatkal brothers, key IM members from the state on the loose are bomb expert Yasin Bhatkal and Mudassar.

Andhra Pradesh

Mufti Abu Bashir, arrested for the Gujarat blasts, Maulana Abdul Aleem Islahi, a SIMI sympathiser who runs a madrasa in Hyderabad, Raziuddin Nasir and Safdar Nagori were involved in setting up the SIMI-IM network in the state. The SIMI set up several religious institutions to continue its activities after it was banned and police suspect Darsgah-e-Jihad-o-Shahadat and Tehrik Tahfuz-e-Shair-e-Islam were two among them.

Maulana Naseeruddin of Tehrik was arrested by Gujarat Police in 2004 for his involvement in the murder of former minister of state for home Haren Pandya. Scores of SIMI-IM members were picked up during the crackdown after the twin-blasts of August 2007 and the Mecca Masjid blasts. They included Raziuddin Nasir, Mohtasin Billa, Mohammed Nissar, Mohammed Muqeemuddin Yaser, Mohammed Sohail, Maulana Naseeruddin and Jaber Naseeruddin.

Police claim that they have managed to “finish off” SIMI-IM in the state after “tightening the noose around a few madrasas whose activities were suspect”. Vikar Ahmed, who shot at two policemen in Hyderabad last August, is the only one absconding, besides a few sympathisers against whom police say they do not have evidence.

Delhi

The Delhi module of IM was led by Atif Ameen and is blamed for the serial blasts of 2008 in the Capital. After the blasts, the Delhi Police cracked Ameen’s module in Batla House and killed two Atif and Mohammad Sajid. Five IM members were also arrested from Delhi: Mohammad Saif, Zeeshan Ahmed, Mohammad Shakeel, Zia-Ur-Rehman and Saqib Nisar. Two others, Shahzad Ahmed and Ariz Khan alias Pappu managed to flee but Shahzad was arrested from Azamgarh this month. The Delhi Police continues to look for 12 SIMI-IM members, including Amir Raza Khan, Riyaz and Iqbal Bhatkal, Mohammad Khaild, Salman, Asadullah Akhtar, Dr Shahnawaz, Mohammad Sajid and Ariz Khan.

With inputs from Bhupendra Pandey, Johnson T A, Sreenivas Janyala, Shaju Philip and Neeraj Chauhan

NRI Muslims financing SIMI, IM’s jihad in India

Diaspora cash fed domestic jihad

 Praveen Swami,May 08, 2009, The Hindu

Kerala computer engineer’s story casts light on Indian Mujahideen funding

 Nawaz’s journey into jihad began in SIMI’s study groups

India so far had little success in cracking down on terror financing

 

---

 HYDERABAD: Late last year, four Keralites training with a Lashkar-e-Taiba unit in the Kupwara mountains, along the Line of Control in northern Kashmir, were shot dead by security forces.

And since the September shootout, the police in Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala have been scrambling to unravel the threads that tied Indian Mujahideen groups in the south to each other and to the Lashkar.

But the investigations also show that the Indian Mujahideen was fed and watered by transnational financial networks: networks linked both to diasporic Islamists living in west Asia and Pakistan-based organisations like the Lashkar.

From the story of Ernakulam-born computer engineer Sarfaraz Nawaz, who was expelled by the Oman authorities earlier this year, investigators have been able to understand the relationship between domestic terror and diaspora cash.

SIMI background

Like so many Indian Mujahideen-linked figures, Nawaz’s journey into jihad began in the Students Islamic Movement of India’s study groups.

Nawaz began attending SIMI meetings in 1995, soon after he graduated from high school. He became an “Ikhwan” or full-time SIMI member within a year and by March 2000 was made a member of the now-proscribed Islamist organisation’s central committee.

Close ties

While in New Delhi, where he also served as the SIMI’s office secretary, Nawaz developed a close relationship with several key members of what would later become the organisation’s jihad faction, including Safdar Nagori, Yahya Kamakutty and Peedical Abdul Shibly.

When the SIMI was proscribed in 2001, Nawaz decided to move abroad. He first found work in a computer firm operating out of Ibra, in Oman, and later joined the Ajman-based Ibn Sina Medical Centre, which was owned by the former Kerala SIMI president Abdul Ghafoor.

Later, other SIMI contacts helped him to find a job in Dubai. Finally, in July 2006 Nawaz moved back to Muscat and began working at the al-Noor Education Trust, which offered computer courses.

Newly married and prosperous, Nawaz appeared to live the kind of quiet life most in the Indian diaspora aspire to. But the Oman authorities now believe the appearance was intended to deceive.

Soon after returning to Muscat, the investigators say, Nawaz made contact with Abdul Aziz al-Hooti, a Muscat-based businessman with substantial interests in the automobile business and the Lashkar. Hooti, in turn, introduced Nawaz to a ranking Pakistani Lashkar operative, who is so far known only by the aliases Rehan and Wali.

Funds flow

Early in 2008, the police in Hyderabad and Bangalore believe, Nawaz and Rehan met in Dubai to finalise funding for two important “projects.”

In Hyderabad, fugitive Indian Mujahideen commander Tadiyantavide Nasir was preparing several Keralites to journey across the Line of Control to Lashkar training camps in Pakistan.

Safe house

Nasir used his position as an instructor at the city’s Jamia Arifiya Nooriya seminary to recruit volunteers. He set up a safe house in Madikere, near Coorg, for their basic indoctrination.

In August, 2008, Rehan allegedly provided the funds and contacts that led the first group of volunteers’ travel to Jammu and Kashmir. The Indian Mujahideen units also needed funding, Nawaz was told, to execute a series of bombings in Bangalore.

Rehan and Hooti, the Bangalore police say, asked Nawaz to travel to India for an on-site briefing about these plans. Both men were evidently impressed by what he found, for an estimated 2,500 Oman Rials was despatched to the Indian Mujahideen through a Kannur-based hawala dealer.

Later, the investigators say, Dhaka-based Lashkar operative Mubashir Shahid provided more money to secure Nasir’s escape into Bangladesh and to compensate the families of the men killed in Jammu and Kashmir.

Complex web

Police officers involved in the Nawaz investigation believe that several similar funding networks fed different elements of the Indian Mujahideen.

Indian Mujahideen co-founder Sadiq Sheikh, for example, lived in Dubai for several months with the help of ganglord Aftab Ansari and his lieutenant Amir Reza Khan. During his stay, Sheikh said in a statement to the Hyderabad Police, he discovered that key Indian Mujahideen commander Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri also visited the city to raise funds.

Sheikh never met with Shahbandri’s contacts, but it seems likely that Nawaz himself was in touch with several SIMI-linked figures who were engaged in fundraising for jihadist groups. Important among them was CAM Basheer, a fugitive SIMI leader, who is thought to be living in Sharjah using fake identification.

Basheer, police sources say, visited Nawaz in Muscat at least once and carried funds intended to facilitate Nasir’s efforts to recruit jihadists in Kerala.

Maulana Abdul Bari, a Hyderabad cleric last sighted in Saudi Arabia, is also thought to have raised funds in the diaspora for the training of jihadist cadre recruited in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka.

A costly failure

India has so far had little success in cracking down on terror financing. Nawaz’s story shows just how expensive this failure has been and how costly it could, yet, prove.

Indian Muslim Raziuddin Naser’s 18-month, multi-location terrorist training programme in Pakistan

Our Internal Insecurity
Ashok Malik, Hindustan Times
February 19, 2009

On the morning of January 11, 2008, at Honnali on the Hosur-Hubli road in Karnataka, a policeman stopped two young men riding a motorcycle. One of them was not wearing a helmet. The usual questions followed, papers were demanded and it was found that the motorcyclists were carrying several number-plates, ostensibly assigned in several states.

The two men were arrested. One of them, Raziuddin Naser, originally from Hyderabad, turned out to be a key operative of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (Simi) — later to metamorphose into the Indian Mujahideen (IM) — somebody the Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat Police had been seeking.

Naser and his accomplice were on their way to Goa, as he told interrogators, to “conduct serial blasts… to kill Israeli and American tourists“. If that mission had gone well, he was due to travel to Bangalore to attempt to bomb installations of IT companies. Naser’s statement before the Karnataka police makes for fascinating reading. In the context of the rather pointless debate about whether the ten Pakistani terrorists who attacked Mumbai on November 26, 2008, had “local support” or did not, it is worth revisiting what Naser told his questioners about the methods and motivational protocols of domestic jihadists.

Of course, no single interrogation or piece of evidence can reveal the entire truth. Yet, from what intelligence and anti-terrorist agencies have gathered over the past year — the Anti-Terrorist Squads (ATS) in Lucknow, Mumbai and Gandhinagar, in particular, are sitting on a mine of information, as are police officers in locations as far apart as Bhopal and Hyderabad — the different, disparate pieces of the jigsaw begin to fit. It becomes obvious that the interoperability of and relationship between groups such as the IM and external agents recruited in, say, Pakistani Punjab and trained in Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) camps, are neither absolute nor completely absent.

Naser is the son of a religio-political preacher called Mohammed Naseeruddin. Secretary of the Hyderabad-based Tehreek Tahfuzz Shaeer-e-Islam, the father was once arrested by the local police for terror-related activities. In October 2004, he was arrested by the Gujarat Police in the Old City of Hyderabad, in an operation that was hindered by massive crowds and led to firing in which a local youth was killed. By then, Naser and at least one of his brothers — now also in the custody of the Karnataka Police — were already converts. Naser explained that after 9/11, he had been much taken with the idea of joining the jihad against America in Afghanistan.In August 2005, he travelled to Saudi Arabia, a trip facilitated by a Hyderabadi friend whose brother, Abdul Samad, lived in Jeddah. Samad sent Naser for what eventually became an 18-month, multi-location training programme in Pakistan.

It is here that the story gets interesting. Naser describes different types of training in different cities. From Karachi, he is driven to Gwadar (Baluchistan), where he is introduced — along with others — to the use of assault rifles that include AK-47s, light-machine guns, “Bren machine guns…. Austrian Styre sniper rifles” and so on.

At the LeT complex of Markaz Tayyabah, near Lahore, he is taught horse riding. In Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, in Muzaffarabad and Manshehra — where one of his co-trainees is a Maldives national called ‘Abu Zaid’, who Naser says was later killed in the Kashmir Valley — and in a “mountainous” training centre he learns about “guerrilla warfare, ambush, hideout, raid, camouflage, recce…” In Rawalpindi, he learns of the “use of satellite phones… [and] disadvantages of using mobile and land lines”. In PoK again, he mixes hydrogen peroxide with rice, dal, mehndi and tobacco, and produces explosives. When Naser was arrested, he was on his way to waylay a truck that he knew was carrying hydrogen peroxide — a chemical that has industrial uses but is also present in cosmetics. He was to carry a part of his loot to Goa and execute the bombings. The use of hydrogen peroxide, easily available and not as difficult to source as say RDX, was seen as a cheap, low-cost terror mechanism.

It is worth noting that the 2008 terror bombings in, for example, Delhi and Ahmedabad also used commonly accessible chemicals. Earlier, two suspected terrorists had been arrested in Goa — in an incident unrelated to Naser — while working in a beauty parlour, attempting to pilfer cosmetics and hydrogen peroxide.

On January 1, 2008, in preparation for the Goa mission, a contact called ‘Aslam’ had visited Naser in Hubli and gave him two fake student identity cards — of BVB College of Engineering, Hubli, and of St Aloysius College. Ironically, the terrorists who attacked the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Hotels in Mumbai also carried student identity cards related to Karnataka-based colleges. Is this suggestive of a local link, admittedly a low-level and possibly non-lethal one, or is this a mere coincidence?

Was the intensive, sometimes commando-style training Naser got indicative of his recruiters identifying him for a high-profile urban guerrilla-style attack and then deciding he wasn’t up to it and demoting him to the less sophisticated, hydrogen peroxide type bombings? Do the 26/11 attacks and the dozen-odd bombings that major Indian cities experienced in 2007-08 form a continuum? To the UPA government, have these become inconvenient truths?

(Ashok Malik is a Delhi-based writer)

Ahmedabad blasts terrorists were brainwashed with Iraq, Babri, Gujarat riots

‘Brainwashed with Iraq, Babri, Gujarat riots’
Kamaal Saiyed, Feb 11, 2009

Surat: Tears streaming down his face, his hands trembling, the man who allegedly led the serial bombing of Ahmedabad that killed 58 and injured over 200 last July claimed he was brainwashed and ensnared into doing what he did by radical Islamist handlers.
Qayamuddin Kapadia, 28, of the Indian Mujahideen — prime accused in the Ahmedabad blasts and a key suspect in the Surat bomb-planting as well as in the Delhi blasts — spoke exclusively to The Indian Express in the custody of Surat police today.

The plan to carry out the Ahmedabad blasts and the planting of 29 live bombs in Surat, Kapadia said, was firmed up in January 2008 at a clandestine meeting of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) in Halol in Vadodara.

But that was only a culmination of earlier meetings, including a SIMI meeting that he attended in Kerala in August 2006. Among those who led the crucial Halol meeting was SIMI General Secretary Safdar Nagori whom the Madhya Pradesh police arrested in March last year, Kapadia said.

If Kapadia is to be believed, his transformation from an ordinary Muslim youth with ordinary dreams and a loving family to look after to one of the country’s top Terror accused, is a tale of intense indoctrination.

It started with Kapadia, a deeply religious youth, meeting up with Sajid Mansuri, the SIMI hardliner and a qualified engineer who is also in police custody now for the Ahmedabad blasts. His journey to terror began in a closed little room in Vatva.

“I met Sajid Mansuri during December 2007, we soon became friends. Both he and I were privately doing Islamic propagation work in Vadodara, and we began getting much closer to each other. Some time later, he introduced me to Abdul Subhan alias Tauqeer in a room in Vatva area where Maulana Abubashar (another key accused in the blasts) and a few other youths were there. Later, Sajid Mansuri left the place and we stayed with Tauqeer.”

Tauqeer, says Kapadia, would hold a Majlis (meetings) with them thrice a day in that room. “We were not allowed to go out even to the mosques for prayers, we were told to pray inside that room.”

The Majlis sessions were intense, appealing strongly to the religious, emotional and intellectual sentiments of the captive audience. “Each Majlis would start with the recitation of the holy Quran verses by Maulana Abu Bashar. Then Taqueer would begin by reminding us about the war sanctioned by the holy Prophet to save Islam in this world. The topic would then gradually shift to the current situation of Muslims the world over — we would be made to believe Muslims everywhere are being tortured and and murdered, giving many examples, like that of Palestine and the torture of innocent Iraqi Muslims by US soldiers.”

Then the speakers would turn closer home. “They would keep reminding us about the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the 2002 Gujarat riots. They would show us photographs of dead bodies of Muslim women and children burnt and brutally killed in communal violence”, Kapadia recalled.

“From among us, they selected enthusiastic youths who are both physically and mentally strong, and loyal to their ideology. They relentlessly kept convincing us that someone from the community should take revenge and kill people of particular community. I was one of the few Taqueer selected, and he he kept me with him for three months.”

The recruits were kept isolated. “They didn’t allow us to meet even our family members. During Majlis, they would explain to us the meaning of verses from the Quran and interpret those to convince us that we must take revenge and give a proper retaliation to persecution. Later, I came to know that the particular volumes of Quran that they had used to read out and interpret meanings was different from what is found in the market.”

Kapadia remained in Tauqeer’s company for three months from April 2008 and visited different places in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. According to Kapadia, Taqueer spoke fluent English, regularly read English newspapers, and kept watching international news on TV. “He would particularly look for news of the torture of Muslims in the other countries. Taqueer wanted to keep everything secret and had warned Kapadia not to disclose his working style even to Sajid Mansuri, he said.

Weeks went by, and soon came July 26, when the bombs they planted in Ahmedabad left a trial of blood and gore. Three months of desperate hide-and-seek with the law and then Kapadia was picked up from Indore.

“Main sirf ek baat kehna chahta hoon un Muslim ladkon se jo abhi tak in logon ki giraft mein nahin aye hain. Yeh log aapko Muslimon par huwe zulm ke photo dikhakar aur kaumwad ki batein sunakar aapko emotional karke apni taraf attract karte hain. Aur desh virodhi kaam karne ke liye uksate hain.” (I want to convey only one message to Muslim youths who haven’t been ensnared yet. They will show you photos and tell you stories of torture on Muslims and make you emotional. They will then convince you to carry out anti-national activities.)

Kapadia broke down saying he has lost all touch with his elderly parents, his wife and his small daughter and they have no one to take care of them.

Mumbai terror attack shows strong local Muslim support network

Probe suggests extensive local support network
Josy Joseph
Friday, December 05, 2008

Links seen between Mumbai attack and raid on IISC in 2005

NEW DELHI: Investigators have fanned out across India to check out several leads available from the Mumbai attacks. The information gathered so far indicates the existence of a massive secretive network with tentacles in Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore,
Dhaka, and elsewhere.

In Delhi and Kolkata, investigators are trying to find out who bought the SIM cards that were later recovered from the slain terrorists in Mumbai. Sources said the Kolkata police have identified at least two youths who may have bought SIM cards in West Bengal. They are believed to have bought the cards from three different places using a fake voter’s identity card in the name of Hossain Ur Rahman. In Delhi, investigators are looking at shops in Karol Bagh from where the SIM cards were bought.

The jigsaw being put together suggests the terror attacks mounted by Pakistan-based youths had strong support from a homegrown network. The same network may have been involved in recent strikes. Though it is not a cohesive group, the network
comprises several former Simi (Students Islamic Movement of India) members with a strong base in Hyderabad and other parts of South India. The group has deep linkages with the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has since denied involvement in the attacks. This group is influenced by Taliban and al-Qaeda ideology.

Suspicions about this group, which for some time has been calling itself Indian Mujahideen, have been firmed up by links emerging between the latest Mumbai attacks and the 2005 attack on the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

The networks of Shahid Bilal, a Hyderabad resident who was killed in Pakistan some time ago, and Riazuddin Nasir, his close associate who was arrested in Karnataka, had joined hands with a faction of Simi and other like-minded youths to create a network of India’s most formidable terror supporters. This group is believed to have carried out several bombings in Indian cities and assisted in the attacks on the IISc, mostly under the banner of Indian Mujahideen. The Mumbai attacks were carried out under the banner of Deccan Mujahideen.

Sources said Abu Hamza, who escaped after the December 28, 2005, attack on the IISc, was a key motivator for the 10-member terror group that attacked Mumbai. They were convinced by Hamza that it was easy to fool the Indian police and escape back to Pakistan, according to arrested terrorist Ajmal Kasab, now in the custody of the Mumbai Police.

Investigators believe that the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Dhaka-based operatives obtained the Indian SIM cards and supplied them for use during the attacks. The terrorists were also provided with SIM cards from Austria and the US. Besides, several GPS systems and a Thuraya satellite phone were in the possession of the terrorists, according to a source.

The investigators are also combing through several leads pointing to the possible involvement of the underworld, especially smuggling gangs, in organising logistical support for the terror group. The customs department has for the past few months been investigating the massive smuggling of diesel and other items by a group of Dawood Ibrahim henchmen, especially one led by a Colaba-based customs clearing agent. His son and the son’s employees are being investigated.

As of now, the most noticeable challenge for the investigators is to find out the extent of local support made available to the terrorists. “We still haven’t made a breakthrough,” said a senior official. He said unless the local contacts are unearthed, it would be difficult to get at the full truth behind the conspiracy.

Also click

SIM cards used in Mumbai attack bought from Kolkata

“The SIM cards were purchased from Park Street and 24 Parganas (South) including Maheshtala in the name of Hossain-ur-Rahman and smuggled out of the country through Indo-Bangladesh border and then to Pakistan, official sources said.

The buyer of the pre-paid SIM cards had submitted forged election identity card as proof of residence bearing address as Bashirhat, near the Indo-Bangla border, they said, adding the agencies were trying to locate remaining seven SIM cards.”

9 reasons how UPA government encouraged Islamic terrorism in India

Fight against terror – record, reasons and suggestions!

Monday, 01 December 2008, 03:30 PM
B R Haran

This is the 19th major terror attack happened in the last four and a half years (7th attack in the last 7 months) of miserable administration by the UPA government. The enormity of the attacks could be realised from the fact that more than 1200 people have lost their lives and almost three thousand people have been injured in this period. No sensible, responsible and patriotic government would have brazenly continued in office after this Mumbai terror attack, and in the first place, no such government would have allowed the ‘internal security’ to reach such squalid levels!

It is not at all difficult to find out the reasons for this government’s utter failure in the fight against terror.

1.  The first move by this UPA government after coming to power in May 2004 was to repeal ‘POTA’, the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The repealing of POTA has become, in other words, as enacting of another POTA, the Protection of Terrorists Act!

2. The UPA government refused to hang the dreaded terrorist Afzal Guru, the mastermind of Parliament attack.

3. Its state government in Kerala passed a resolution for the release of hardcore terrorist Abdul Nazar Madhani from Coimbatore prisons. It didn’t prevail upon its ally, the ruling DMK in Tamilnadu, to appeal against the release of Madhani, giving scant regards to the death of sixty innocent people and injury of over 200 people in the Coimbatore blasts. (It is no surprise that Unnikrishnan, father of martyred Major Sandeep, showed the doors to Madhani’s supporters!)

4. It restrained the Gujarat government from taking severe actions against the accused in the Godhra train carnage and the subsequent riots. It didn’t approve the Gujarat government’s ordinance (Gujarat Organised Crime Act 2001) on terror. It constituted the Bannerjee Committee with a deliberate intention to exonerate the Godhra accused showing slight respects to the 59 people, who were roasted alive.

5. It facilitated the illegal immigration of Bangladeshis through IMDT Act and Foreigners Act.

6. It restrained the Armed Forces from taking stringent actions against the Kashmiri militants and joined the Kashmir parties like NC & PDP in maligning the Army. It reduced the number of forces deployed in the borders in the name of confidence building measure and facilitated infiltration of terrorists.

7. It allowed SIMI to regroup and spread to all corners of the country.

8. It allowed the mushrooming of fundamentalist institutions such as Madrasas and even started funding them in the name of modernisation and minority development.

9. It has not given freedom to the intelligence agencies to carry out their jobs, but blamed them every time when a terror attack occurred. It has also not allowed the investigation agencies to complete their job and so far, there is not even a single terror attack thoroughly investigated and charge sheets filed.

Read in full including strategies to combat terrorism here

Muslim leader shoots, seriously injures police, red alert in Hyderabad

Two Indian police injured in shooting in Hyderabad
Wed Dec 3, 2008
HYDERABAD, India, Dec 3 (Reuters) – Two policemen who tried to arrest a local Muslim leader in the southern city of Hyderabad were injured on Wednesday when an unknown assailant open fire.

Police said officers were searching for the member of a Muslim self-defence organisation, when one of his companions opened fire with a home-made pistol.

The shooting came amid heightened security across Indian after the attacks in Mumbai by Islamist militants that killed 171 people.

Ex-SIMI activist opens fire at police, Hyderabad on alert
Dec 03, 2008

There was panic in Hyderabad after a former SIMI activist Waqar Ahmed, an accused in the Mecca Masjid blast case, opened fire on a police team at Santhoshnagar Cross Roads today afternoon. Waqar Ahmed has been absconding and police said they received a tip-off that he was moving around in the slums adjoining Santhoshnagar. A team of anti-insurgency force was dispatched there to check the information. Police officials said that head constables Rama Raju and Jaffer Sheikh spotted him walking near the Santhoshnagar cross road and started to chase him. Police said, in his attempt to flee Ahmed opened fire at the cops in which Raju was hit in the stomach and collapsed on the road. He has been rushed to the Apollo DRDO hospital where his condition is stated to be serious.

“A police patrol recognised him and he was surrounded but suddenly he opened fire and a Head Constable A Raju was hit in the stomach. He has been admitted to the Apollo Hospital. The activist fled the spot in the ensuing melee,” Hyderabad Police Commissioner B Prasada Rao said.

Meanwhile, a red alert has been announced in the city as police is trying to verify if the former SIMI activist was alone or was accompanied by others. Police put up barricades across the city and all vehicles are being checked. Additional forces have been rushed to public places and suspicious persons are being frisked and their identifies are being checked.

SIMI literature spreading vitriolic hate towards Hindu religion

Despite ban, SIMI stoking passions
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Rakesh K Singh | New Delhi

The ban on the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) has failed to curb the outfit’s jihadi designs of spreading its terror network from Kashmir in the north to Tamil Nadu in the south and from Maharashtra in the west to Assam and Manipur in the east with the intent to stir up communal passions.

Documents and literature seized by the Madhya Pradesh police and the Intelligence Bureau show that even after the ban, the terror outfit was actively engaged in running a vitriolic campaign against the Hindu religion through its monthly publication, Tahreek-e-Millat (Movement for Coordination) ((RNI No 2003/10770).

In its April 2005 issue, the outfit’s mouthpiece carried a story by Ibn-e-Mumtaz Shahabadi, headlined “Exposing Hindutva — Kya Ram Aatankvad Ke Himayati They?” (Was Lord Rama a supporter of terrorism?). A copy of the issue is in possession of The Pioneer.

The article compared lord Hanuman’s act of setting Lanka on fire with terror attacks using weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Another write-up in the same issue portrays lord Rama as a “failed husband” under the sub-title “Ek Naakaam Pati Tha Ram” (lord Rama was a failed husband). The perverted portrayal of the Ramayana also paints Sita as having abused lord Rama for doubting her character.

The magazine makes several other offensive and derogatory comments about the Hindu religion, publication of which could be highly offensive to the majority community.

The SIMI’s propaganda machinery remains fully active and its cadre base is expanding despite the ban. The Intelligence Bureau has furnished a list of more than 200 SIMI terrorists operating in Madhya Pradesh alone. The agency has also provided a State-wise list of 400 other cadre of SIMI, active in other States like Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

However, the intelligence agencies are yet to track an arms dump of the outfit at Darjeeling, as revealed by the top leaders of SIMI during questioning by police.

Revelations by SIMI chief Safdar Nagori about the possession of Chinese hand grenades by the outfit have “rattled” the Union Home Ministry as they point to the outfit’s links with the Bangladesh’s Directorate General of Forces’ Intelligence and the militant outfits of the North-East, a senior official pointed out.

During the narco test, the SIMI commander revealed, “There are sleeper cells of SIMI in Hubli in Karnataka and the intelligence (IB) is very much aware of them.” Nagori has already admitted about the outfit’s infiltration in a number of educational institutions in Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and the Jamia Millia Islamia.