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Behind the Mecca Masjid bombing

Praveen Swami

Communal violence, organised crime, and the global jihad intersect in Andhra Pradesh's capital.

— Photo: MohammedYousuf

The street leading to the house of `Bilal,' suspected to be the mastermind who planned the Hyderabad blasts, in Moosaram Bagh.

HOUSE 16-11-240, Moosaram Bagh, reads the address on the police dossier of the man the Hyderabad Police believe planned and executed the Mecca Masjid bombing. Underneath, the document records his known aliases: `Bilal,' `Shahid.'

Like most of the buildings in the lower middle-class neighbourhood that surrounds it, the well-constructed two-storey home in which alleged Mecca Masjid bomber Abdul Rehman grew up bears few signs of its past as a slum tenement. One of Rehman's brothers, Samad Rehman, works for a multinational corporation based in Saudi Arabia, and part of the remittances he sends home have evidently been put to good use. Home to both Hindus and Muslims, Moosaram Bagh is the site of thousands of similar success stories.

It is also one of the neighbourhoods that helped give birth to the Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami's Hyderabad operations.

Starting in September 2002, at least 14 young men from Hyderabad set out on secret trips to terror training camps in Pakistan. A decade earlier, the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists had led several recruits from Hyderabad into the lap of the Lashkar-e-Taiba. This time around, the hatred generated by the communal pogrom in Gujarat helped Islamist terror groups reap a fresh harvest.

Rehman, the Hyderabad Police say, was one of those 14 men. Now 26, Rehman dropped out of college less than a year after his graduation from the Asafiya High School in Hyderabad. It is unclear if he developed links with Hyderabad-based Islamist groups during this period, for Rehman's name only began figuring in intelligence records from January 2004. What is probable, though, is that he had at least some knowledge of the networks that sustained the Lashkar's presence in the city. Rehman was related by marriage, through his brother Khaliq Rehman, to one of India's most wanted men — Gujarat mafioso Yakub Khan Pathan.

Better known by the alias Rasool Khan `Party,' Pathan had long-standing links with the Karachi-based mafia of Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar. In the wake of the Gujarat riots, Pathan took responsibility for transporting the new wave of jihadi recruits for training. According to the testimony of mafia operative Javed Hamidullah Siddiqui, who was arrested in 2004, Dawood lieutenant Shakeel Ahmad Babu arranged the new recruits' passage on flights through Bangkok and Dhaka. Pathan, who has been wanted by Interpol ever since 1993, was waiting for them on their arrival in Karachi. While some recruits trained with the Lashkar, others were routed on to the Jaish-e-Mohammad.

Within months of their departure, the new recruits executed their first successful strikes. Asad Yazdani, a resident of Hyderbad's Toli Chowki area, helped execute the assassination of the former Gujarat Home Minister, Haren Pandya. Pandya, a Central Bureau of Investigations inquiry found, was killed in reprisal for his role in the communal pogrom. Pathan helped put together much of the infrastructure for the assassination.

Although the new recruits had trained with the Lashkar and the Jaish, they turned to the Bangladesh-based HuJI for operational support. Founded by Bangladeshi veterans of the anti-Soviet Union jihad in Afghanistan, the HuJI operates at least six camps where several hundred Pakistani, Indian, Thai, and Myanmar nationals are known to have trained. Its founder, Mufti Abdul Hannan, spent several years studying at the Dar-ul-Uloom seminary at Deoband, Uttar Pradesh, and developed a large network of contacts among Islamists in India. He also built links with key figures of organised crime. Among the group's most high-profile actions in India was the January 2002 terror attack near the American Centre in Kolkata, executed in collaboration with Dawood-linked mafioso Aftab Ansari.

Last year, the Delhi Police arrested two of Yazdani's Bangladeshi recruits, the twin brothers Anishul Murshlin and Muhibbul Muttakin. Both confirmed speculation that Yazdani had executed several major strikes in India. One of these, they said, had been the June 2005 bombing of the Delhi-Patna Shramjeevi Express at Jaunpur. Yazdani, it turned out, was also responsible for the October 2005 suicide bombing of the headquarters of the Andhra Pradesh Police's counter-terrorism Special Task Force. A Bangladeshi national, Mohtasin Bilal, had carried out the bombing — the first HuJI operation of its kind. From the twins, Indian intelligence also heard the name of the man Yazdani reported to — a man they knew by the aliases `Shahid' and `Bilal.'

Between April and June 2005, investigators were able to establish, Rehman had been based in Bidar, Karnataka, organising the safe-houses, communications infrastructure, and escape routes that allowed the HuJI's Bangladesh-based cells to strike with such efficiency and ease. Yazdani was shot dead in March 2006, just hours after the bombing of the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi — another lethal attack which was traced to the HuJI's Bangladesh-based cells. Rehman's brother, Zahid Rehman, was arrested on charges of aiding this operation, and is still in jail awaiting conclusion of his trial.

Of Rehman himself, however, there was no trace. Indian intelligence informants have reported sightings in Karachi and Dhaka, while Rehman's family insists he is in the undeclared custody of the Hyderabad Police. Whatever the truth, the fact is that Rehman is just a small part of a far larger story: the Islamist campaign against Hyderabad.

Hyderabad and the global jihad

Speaking at a Lashkar rally in February 2000, its top ideologue Abdul Rehman Makki announced that the organisation had set in place a new campaign to "liberate Hyderabad from Hindu rule." Hyderabad had been seized by force, he proclaimed, and would be won back through the sword.

Such language is not new. In 1948, over half a century before Makki's speech, Islamist guerrilla Kasim Rizvi had promised to fly the Nizam of Hyderabad's flag "on the Red Fort in Delhi." According to the memoirs of the former commander-in-chief of Pakistan's armed forces, Lieutenant-General Gul Hassan Khan, an unnamed "elder statesman" helped funnel covert military aid to the group.

For years before Makki's speech, the Lashkar had been attempting to build a network using local Islamists. Perhaps the most successful of the Lashkar's agents was Mohammad Ishtiaq, the son of a shopkeeper from Kala Gujran in Pakistan's Jhelum district. Operating under the alias Salim Junaid, Ishtiaq obtained an Indian passport and even married a local resident, Momina Khatoon.

Ishtiaq, however, was arrested before he could do real harm. In 1998, responding to pleas from the Lashkar's leadership, Hyderabad resident Mohammad Azam Ghauri returned to India to help rebuild its networks. One of the three co-founders of the Lashkar's Indian networks, Ghauri had fled in the wake of the serial bombing of 43 trains in December 1993, an operation executed to avenge the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

Ghauri turned to friends in Hyderabad's organised crime cartels for help. In 1999, his long-standing friend, Dawood-linked hit-man Abdul Aziz Sheikh, attempted to assassinate Shiv Sena leader Milind Vaidya. Help was also sought, and received, from remnants of the mafia of Mohammad Fasiuddin, which had executed local Hindu fundamentalist leaders Papiah Goud and Nanda Raj Goud as retaliation for the 1992 anti-Muslim pogrom in Hyderabad. Soon after Makki's speech, the new network set off bombs at cinema theatres in Karimnagar and Nanded.

Eight weeks after these bombings, Ghauri was shot dead in a police encounter. Islamists continued, however, to attempt to build new networks in Hyderabad. In August 2001, the Hyderabad Police arrested one of the most intriguing figures in this effort, an unassuming electrician named Abdul Aziz. While working in Saudi Arabia, Aziz had come into contact with an Islamist recruiter looking for volunteers to join the global jihad. Aziz served in Bosnia in 1994, and then fought alongside Shamil Basayev's Chechen Islamists in 1996. In 1999, Aziz again flew to Tbilisi, in search of a second tour of duty. He was, however, deported. With the help of funds from a Saudi Arabia-based Lashkar financier, Aziz returned home to try and initiate a jihad of his own.

Aziz, investigators found, hoped to draw on the resources of the Darsgah Jihad-o-Shahadat, or Institute for Holy War and Martyrdom — an Islamist vigilante group set up in the mid-1980s. Although its website claims that the organisation's purpose is "protecting the life and properties of [the] Muslim community," and "preserving the honour and chastity of women," the organisation also candidly states that "Islamic supremacy is our goal." While such groups have no large-scale legitimacy among Muslims in Hyderabad, their hardline polemic is attractive to young people infuriated by communal violence.

What the Mecca Masjid bombings make clear is that the Islamist threat to India's cities remains in place, notwithstanding the decline in violence since the Mumbai serial bombings. Under intense pressure from the United States and Europe, Pakistan has been compelled to rein in the Lashkar. Attacks on mosques, Islamist terror groups appear to hope, will be blamed on Hindu fundamentalist organisations — and thus provide the pretext they need to throw off the shackles. Under intense pressure from Islamists at home, it is unclear just how long Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf will be able to fend off the pressure.

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