New insights into Indian Mujahideen network

fPraveen Swami
Source: The Hindu
Also look at the List of faces of terror from NDTV

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SIMI leaders provided the foundations for Ahmedabad operation

Most contentious part of network was a group of U.P. men centred around Atif Amin

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NEW DELHI: India’s intelligence and police services now believe that the Indian Mujahideen is not a terror group, but a loose network of Islamist groups tied together by a common cause and ideological affiliation.

Based on a careful study of the mechanics of the July 26 serial bombings of Ahmedabad, investigators believe that the Indian Mujahideen is made up of three distinct elements: Students Islamic Movement of India volunteers, a group of Uttar Pradesh men with links to the Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami and the jihadist-linked crime cartel of jailed mafioso Aftab Ansari.

SIMI foundations

Students Islamic Movement of India leaders — many of whom knew Ghauri and Husaini — provided the foundations for the Ahmedabad operation.

Key SIMI organiser Qayamuddin Kapadia, who has evaded arrest, led a team of Gujarat-based volunteers who provided the local knowledge critical for the success of the operation.

Many members of this ring, whose key members included Usman Agarbattiwala and Sajid Mansuri, were drawn to the jihad by personal experiences of the Gujarat communal pogrom of 2002. For example, Imran Ibrahim Sheikh was forced to drop out of school when his mother — the family’s sole earning member — was injured in the violence.

SIMI had begun preparing itself for participation in the Indian Mujahideen offensive in December 2007, when an estimated 50 cadre participated in a jihad training camp held near Aluva, Kerala. In January 2008, another camp was held on the Pavagadh hills near Halol.

Several follow-up meetings were held, involving Kapadia, Islamist ideologue Mufti Abdul Bashar Qasmi, and Mumbai-based bomb-maker Mohammad Subhan Qureshi — the man who helped to knit the diverse elements of the Indian Mujahideen network together.

Assault team

But the most contentious part of the social network was a group of Uttar Pradesh men centred around Atif Amin — a Jamia Millia Islamia University student, who, the Delhi police say, commanded the most critical cell of the Indian Mujahideen.

Much of the police account emerged from the questioning of Mohammad Shakeel, who was pursuing a Master’s degree in economics, along with Jamia undergraduate Zia-ur-Rahman and New Delhi-based Sikkim Manipal University distance-learning student Saqib Nisar.

While the families and supporters of the three men insist they are innocent, the police claim they were key members of the Indian Mujahideen network.

According to the police, independent witnesses have confirmed that on August 11 the three men were aboard the Ashram Express from Delhi to Ahmedabad, where they and other members of Atif Amin’s team carried out a reconnaissance in preparation for the serial bombings.

Delhi police investigators say Amin at first told his group that the bombings were to be executed on July 19. However, three days before that day, he announced that the plan had been deferred, because the disassembled improvised explosive devices needed for the attacks were yet to arrive.

In fact, the police in Gujarat and Maharashtra now believe, the delay was most likely the outcome of problems faced by the Indian Mujahideen’s organised-crime affiliates in Mumbai.

Car bombs

Aftab Ansari’s key lieutenant Riaz Bhatkal, who is thought to have routed much of the finance for the Indian Mujahideen from Islamists in the Indian diaspora in West Asia, promised to provide three cars to be fitted with bombs. But Bhatkal-lined gangster Afzal Usmani was able to arrange for the theft of the three vehicles used as car bombs in Ahmedabad only on July 15. Usmani and his associates then drove the cars to Ahmedabad, where they were delivered to Amin early on July 17.

Later, Amin’s group assembled the bombs — manufactured at a still-unknown Indian Mujahideen factory that is believed to have been run near Mangalore in Karnataka — at a safe house in Ahmedabad’s Dani Limda area.

By this time, however, Shakeel had returned to Delhi, where he was scheduled to sit for an examination for his Master’s degree. He was, however, ordered to prepare a flat in New Delhi’s Jasola Vihar area, used by the Indian Mujahideen as a safe house, for the arrival of the 13-member assault team led by Amin which returned to the Capital on July 27.

With much of the Indian Mujahideen’s top leadership still at large, it is still unclear just who thought up its name — but investigators say it is likely that its inspiration lay in earlier efforts to build up an indigenous, pan-India jihadist network.

In the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the Mujahideen Islam e-Hind — or the Indian Mujahideen of Islam — led by Mohammad Tufail Husaini bombed a series of trains. Andhra Pradesh-based Mohammad Azam Ghauri, one of the co-founders of the Lashkar’s pan-India operations, later set up the Indian Muslim Mohammadi Mujahideen, which carried out several bombings in 1999.

LeT, Hizb helped SIMI, IM in carrying out blasts’

Source: CNN IBN

New Delhi: The Delhi Police claim to have cracked the serial bomb blast cases, which rocked different parts of the country over the past few months.

Joint Commissioner of Police Special Cell, Delhi Police, Karnail Singh said the terror module behind the blasts is a deadly cocktail of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Hizbul Mujahideen, Indian Mujahideen and Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).

“LeT and Hizbul Mujahideen provided support to Indian Mujahideen and SIMI, who were directly involved in carrying out the serial bomb blasts in Delhi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, UP courts and Varanasi,” Singh said while addressing the media on Saturday evening in New Delhi.

Singh also said that that the terrorist killed by a Special Cell team in New Delhi’s Jamia Nagar area on Friday morning as been identified as Atif and he was kingpin of the terror network.

“Atif and Junaid planted the bombs in Greater Kailash-i M block Market, Sajid and Zeeshan at Barakhambha Road while Saif and Khalid planted the bomb in Ghaffar Market,” Singh added.

Singh also revealed that all the terrorists came from Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh while the explosive for making the bombs came from Karnataka.

The group behind May 13 Jaipur blasts had gone over from Delhi to Jaipur and planted the bombs while the bombs in Ahmedabad were planted by 13 local operatives.

‘Delhi bombs brought from K’taka’

Source: CNN IBN

New Delhi: The perpetrators of the serial bombings in the capital had brought the bombs from Karnataka before the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the Delhi Police said Saturday, adding that one live bomb was yet to be recovered.

“Mohammed Saif and Sajid went to Karnataka and bought 10 bombs to Delhi by train two or three days before the start of Ramzan. But one bomb was detected to be faulty at the last moment and, therefore, was not planted,” Joint Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Karnail Singh said at a press conference here.

He added that bombs were brought here in ready condition and the terrorists here only set the timers.

However, Delhi Police are yet to recover the faulty bomb. “They have thrown the faulty bomb in a drain near Batla House (in Jamia Nagar here). Then there is a live bomb somewhere near the Regal cinema hall (in Connaught Place) but we haven’t recovered them so far,” said a senior police official.

Police recovered a soldering iron, pallets, a laptop and a mobile phone of Atif, a key Indian Mujahideen leader, from a house in Jamia Nagar after a shootout Friday in which two terrorists – Atif and Sajid – were killed and Saif was arrested.

“It was Atif who used to send e-mails to various people including media organizations (about the Indian Mujahideen taking responsibility for the blasts). He was the main co-coordinator of sharing information amongst various organizations,” Singh added.

A terrorist module of 13 people was responsible for recent terror attacks in India including the Uttar Pradesh court blasts of last year and the serial bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and New Delhi this year, police said.

Abdul Subhan Qureshi alias Tauqir has been alleged to have masterminded the Sep 13 synchronized blasts in the capital that killed 24 people and left nearly 100 injured.

Leftist-Islamist alliance in South Asia

Amitabh Tripathi

Victory of Maoists in Nepal has two reactions in India. One which portray this victory as an opportunity for Indian government to pursue Nexalites in India to join mainstream and follow the path of their Nepali counterpart.

According to second reaction victory of Maoists in Nepal is going to deteriorate the security interests of Indian and Indian government should work hard to crush Maoist insurgency in Nepal as well preventing Maoists to make king of Nepal irrelevant in political context.

The most dangerous sign which people in Indian media have shown is that they are pleading for Maoists and it has some serious implications as well reasons. Indian media in general and print in particular has dominance of people who are indoctrinated with Leftist ideology and most of them were activists of Left in their college period. They belong to that period when Marxism was fashion for intellectuals and college campuses were full of these people. In India since 1989 social and political change took place. After Economic reform was initiated and some drastic changes came in existence at economic level it has some impact on society as well. In the mean time surgence of Hindu forces was witnessed and leftist ideology sidelined.

After demolition of Babri structure in Ayodhya in 1992 leftists collaborated with several anti Hindu forces in the name of secularism and in this composition they don’t have more say but were surviving in any way.

After 2000 situation has changed to some extent and social division of have’s and have’s not has come in debate again and it has given a chance to leftist to curse American policies as well some agencies as responsible for all this. In Indian context this development is very important because social disparity has created a vacuum in society and provided an opportunity for any organization to woo have-not’s to their side and Naxalites in India exploited this situation in very shrewd manner. They are active in remote part of India which is very poor, illiterate and geographically scattered and made of hills and forests. Because of its geographical conditions these areas are very much terrorism prone.

Two years back I journeyed one of Naxal effected area named Chhatisgarh and met with some Naxalites. They have clear edge on security forces because of geographical structure but most important thing is that Naxalites working on parallel political and social system. They have their own school in which they not only teach children of tribal but also give financial assistance to their parents. I have a chance to visit their schools also they have their text books and these text books teach that Hindus in India are in alliance with imperialistic America and we have to fight both communal and imperialistic forces because both are two faces of same coin. They talk about a new world order where there will be no disparity and there is equality. They also publish a magazine called Mukti Maarg [way of salvation]. In this magazine they have mobilized those writers and acamecians who have left inclination. Islamists also talk of new world order based on Qur’an and shriyat and both ideologies support repression and violence to achieve their goal.

This theme has also been adopted by Islamists in India against Hindu forces as well as America. This is a common point where Islamists and leftists in India come close to each other. After victory of Maoists in Nepal left academia and establishment in Indian see a chance of resurgence of communism in global perspective and this is the reason why they are pursuing Indian people and government to hail the victory of Maoists and take it as a golden opportunity to take Naxalites back in mainstream.

I want to draw your attention on one more important point about which nobody has discussed but it has serious implications on both India and America. In India leftists have very limited electoral appeal and they are confined to only three states West Bengal, Keral and Tripura and in other states their presence is negligible. In new scenario they are thinking about their resurgence with help of Naxalites. Naxalites have big presence in more than 100 districts of India with states, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, TamilNadu, Jharkhnd, Chhatisgarh, Andhra Pradesh. In these states they have more influence in some pockets. When two years back I visited Chhatisgarh and met with some Naxalites and their sympathizers I was told to have a close look on the developments of Nepal and told me about their plan that when they would be able to brought down system of Nepal and construct it with their plan they will sharpen their movement in India. These sympathizers of Naxalites are almost activists of Communists parties in India and with support of Naxalites and intimidation these sympathizers have a plan to broaden the electoral power of Communists in India.

As earlier I said growth of Naxalites in India have some effect on America also. After 911 we have witnessed several left ideologues overtly supporting Islamists but in India new nexus is building and leftists and Islamists have common enemy in India in the name of Hindu and America. If this nexus will get strength in India and south Asia finally it would damage America and West as well.

Four years back In India there were several people in Media with liberal-left inclination who were saying that Al Qaeda has launched a war against America and India has not to worry because Osama Bin Laden has said nothing against India. It was mischievous misrepresentation of facts. These are the people who want to see the victory of communist ideology at any cost and even they don’t hesitate to make an alliance with Islamists for this cause. Victory of Maoists in Nepal has emboldened leftists in India and they are dreaming of the resurgence of communism.

To counter this growing trend we have to take some initiatives. A parallel nationalist socialist movement should be promoted in India to fill the vacuum of dissatisfied people which ultimately culminates in strong anti imperialistic movement. Once nationalist socialist movement will take place Naxalites have no chance to woo dissatisfied people to their side. This is also true with Chinese hegemony in Asia. Coalition government in India of Congress and Left have some common agenda and congress is eyeing for next 10 years to stay in power. President of Congress Party Mrs Sonia Gandhi grooming her son Rahul Gandhi to hold the post of premiership for next 10 years. To make this happen Congress has to rely heavily on Left parties and this is why congress has adopted the policy of submission to leftists and Islamist. In this situation Indian government in near future is going to embolden the Islamist and leftist forces.

Taking into account the global scenario Indian and American interest has become very much common at least at strategic level. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and China could come close with a block in near future and it would have security implications for India. Nexus of Red green alliance as Dr Richard Benkin has predicted could become reality in South Asia. To prevent this India and America should come together and America should consider Hindu nationalists as their ally.

The Aurangzebs are here allaround

I cant resist saying this otherwise who on earth would go to an extent of killing unknown and anonymous people whom they have not met ever in their life or know their faces for whatever ideology they represent and however true it is.

This report from Hindustan times shows things as they are if not more clear.

Close on the heels of Friday’s blasts in Uttar Pradesh, another email threatening a series of explosions, including an attack on the visiting Pakistani cricket team, is doing the rounds on Saturday.

Television channel ‘India TV’ here claimed to have received an email from “guru_boys2000@yahoo.com” on Saturday morning in which the message threatened the visiting Pakistani cricket team to withdraw from the Test series.

The source and authenticity of the message were yet to be verified. “We will check the message once the television channel hands us over the email,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Alok Kumar said.

Today’s email threatened blasts in various places in Chennai, Ghaziabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Islamabad.

Various Television channels had received an email on Friday also which landed minutes after the first blast rocked the holy town of Varanasi.