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`Slain militant was ruthless criminal'

Devesh K. Pandey

Sallar-ul-Din alias Salim had made U.P. his base to spread terror network: Police

NEW DELHI: For over 15 years, Sallar-ul-Din alias Salim -- gunned down by the police in Lucknow this past Wednesday -- had made Uttar Pradesh his base to spread the terror network. Though he appeared as a pious person to his acquaintances, he was considered a ruthless criminal by the police.

Investigations have revealed that after escaping from police custody by jumping off a running train in Madhya Pradesh in 1988, Salim had fled to UP. Two years later, he was spotted near a masjid in Agra selling talismans and sacred threads to visiting women. Later he joined Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA) and in the garb of "tabeez-wala" began motivating young men to join the ranks. The police suspect that he had killed a Swedish national in Agra following a dispute, but this was not proved.

In 1993-94, Salim shifted to Ferozabad where during his visits to a mosque he allegedly motivated some young men to trigger blasts in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, which were executed on Republic Day in 1996. In connivance with Hamid, who was arrested by the Special Cell of the Delhi police last year in connection with the conspiracy hatched to target the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun, he kept recruiting more people in and around Ferozabad.

Salim allegedly conducted his activities in close coordination with the Students of Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) activists. For his work, he was elevated to the post of HuA chief in Uttar Pradesh by his masters. It is learnt that on one occasion Salim had a fight with a Nepali national at a public booth in Ferozabad following which he severed his head. In 1995 when most leaders of HuA were arrested, Salim was directed to go to Jammu and Kashmir and form "Al-Faran", whose main motto was to secure the release of some of the HuA leaders.

The outfit abducted nine foreigners and even killed some of them. Later, the US Government declared HuA a banned organisation.

Salim then returned to UP and began visiting places like Azamgarh and Aligarh to recruit more "jehadis". In 2002-03, he shifted to the Delhi-Ghaziabad border where he lived for about six months in the house of one Seema. During his visits to a mosque at Zafarabad in North-East Delhi, he met a smack addict. Salim made him give up drugs. Impressed by Salim, the smack addict married off his sister Sanno to Salim.

The police suspect that by 2004 Salim had begun working for the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and was included in a conspiracy to target IMA. Last year when the Special Cell arrested two of his accomplices and killed three others, he vanished from the scene and shifted to Saharanpur.

All these years, Salim seldom contacted his first wife Nafisa, who is from Nagda in Ujjain. Ironically, his mother and two brothers do social service at a "dargah" in Ratlam.

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