The Hindu : New Delhi News : Fresh Delhi police bid to seek SIMI leader’s custody

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Friday, Apr 25, 2008
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Fresh Delhi police bid to seek SIMI leader’s custody

Devesh K. Pandey

The matter is expected to come up for hearing in an Indore court today

Was arrested with 12 other alleged SIMI activists
“Revelations by them not of much significance”

NEW DELHI: The Special Cell of the Delhi Police has made a fresh move seeking custody of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India general secretary Safdar Nagori who was arrested by the Madhya Pradesh Special Task Force last month in connection with a case registered against him here in 2001. The matter is expected to come up for hearing in an Indore court this Friday.

Nagori was arrested with 12 other alleged SIMI activists on a tip-off provided by Central intelligence sleuths. Though the agencies have through the arrests succeeded in neutralising a module of extremists who were planning to strike at the first opportunity, it is learnt that the revelations made by them are not of much significance in providing further leads about the activities of other terrorist modules.

During interrogation, Nagori has purportedly disclosed that there had been a rift within the organisation lately over whether to abjure the path of violence and accept the patronage of some political party to achieve the goal of getting the ban on the outfit rescinded. Unhappy over the developments, Nagori allegedly decided to break away from the group and instead work towards reviving “jehad” by roping in young men, mostly those with a technical bent of mind.

Nagori succeeded in forming a group comprising people from engineering and medical backgrounds. What followed was a series of meetings between them in Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Nagori purportedly confessed to having organised at least seven such meetings during which he asked his men to identify those found guilty by the Srikrishna Commission report during the 1992-93 Mumbai riots. He also directed them to identify those involved in the Gujarat riots and prepare their detailed “bio-data”. The idea behind the whole exercise was to pick individual targets, primarily low-level functionaries.

A major strike allegedly planned by Nagori was to target Israeli tourists in Goa. But the plan failed to take off as Riyazuddin Nasir -- the man who had allegedly been guiding Nagori on how to execute it – was arrested in January.

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