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Jihad in the cyber city

Praveen Swami

Inside SIMI’s terror networks in Karnataka

BANGALORE: If Bangalore needed a face to advertise the new India it represents, it needn’t have looked further than Shibly Peedicaal Abdul.

From small-town origins in Kerala, Abdul built a successful career at a multinational and even set up his own firm. Now, though, he is one of India’s top terrorists: a key player in the Students Islamic Movement of India-linked networks that have carried out a string of terror strikes across southern India since 2003.

Ever since last month’s arrests of Andhra Pradesh resident Raziuddin Nasir and Kerala-origin computer engineer Yahya Kamakutty — leaders, police say, of a terror cell planning bombings in Goa, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai — analysts have been struggling to explain the growth of the jihad in India’s cyber-capital.

SIMI in Karnataka

Police in Bangalore began paying serious attention to SIMI’s network after the 2006 Mumbai serial bombings. Ehtesham Siddiqui, SIMI’s Maharashtra general secretary and one of the alleged architects of the Lashkar-e-Taiba-organised attacks, told police he had been in regular contact with three Bangalore residents.

All the three, it transpired, were successful professionals — very different from stereotypical SIMI recruits. One of Siddiqui’s contacts, computer technician Muzammil Ata-ur-Rehman Sheikh, is now being tried for his role in the serial bombings along with his brother, Faisal Sheikh. Siddiqui also named Kamakutty and Abdul.

Operating through Sarani, a religious front-organisation, Abdul had recruited over a dozen local men — the core of the cell discovered last month. In one e-mail, Abdul demanded members observe the fajr namaaz, or dawn prayers. In another, he asked them to avoid debates with rival Islamists. Just how much the recruits knew about Abdul’s real agenda is unclear.

Behind the scenes, though, Abdul was preparing for war. In 2004, investigators later found, he delivered at least one consignment of weapons in preparation for terror strikes. Rashid Husain, a Bihar-based SIMI activist who also had links to the Jammu and Kashmir-based Islamist leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, is thought to have organised the operation.

Later, Abdul is believed to have participated in a conclave of SIMI members at Ujjain from July 4-7, 2006, where plans to revitalise the jihad in India were discussed. Several members of the cell which executed the Mumbai serial bombings later that year participated. Abdul also set up an independent company, which police suspect laundered terror funds.

Soon after Siddiqui’s arrest, though, Abdul disappeared. Police now had to make a difficult call. Although Kamakutty had long been known to be involved with SIMI’s terror cells — notably having worked with Muhammad Faisal Khan, who helped organise the 2003 serial bombings in Mumbai — he was left untouched, in the hope he would lead police to Abdul.

After Nasir’s arrest last month, Yahya was finally held. Of Abdul, though, there is still no trace. Nor have at least two dozen men thought to have attended the Islamist groups they founded been detected.

Nasir’s own plans were at an early stage — he possessed only crude pistols and some low-grade explosive — but others may be further down the road to a strike.

Roots of the jihad

Unlike Maharashtra or Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka has no history of large-scale communal pogroms, nor a Muslim underclass whose resentments Islamist groups can tap. Yet, the State has fed cadre to SIMI’s operations in southern India — and, as the case of Glasgow airport suicide bomber Kafeel Ahmed demonstrates, even the global jihad.

Why has the jihad flourished here? During his interrogation, police sources say, Nasir argued he was an “extremist,” rather than a “fundamentalist.” Like others in the cell, Nasir claimed his actions were driven not only by religious conviction, but anger against the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.

Other factors, though, also have fed recruitment. Most of Abdul’s multinational-employee recruits were away from home for the first time, lonely and disconnected from their social context. Many travelled abroad, encountering both religious discrimination as well as global Islamist causes and organisations in the process.

Figures like Abdul stand on the far fringes of Karnataka’s Muslim community, which has been deeply hostile to SIMI-style Islamism. Most Karnataka clerics, too, reject the jihadist project. Still, the success with which Abdul preyed on the fringes of Bangalore’s cyber dream poses difficult questions — with no easy answers.

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