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Bombings focus attention on SIMI networks

Praveen Swami

Attacks intended to show that they have survived arrest of top leadership, investigators believe

NEW DELHI: Police and intelligence investigators believe that the serial bombings in Ahmedabad and Bangalore demonstrate that the Students Islamic Movement of India’s networks have recovered from the recent arrest of top SIMI leadership.

Mohammad Subhan Qureshi, a top operative who held at least half a dozen training courses for new recruits across southern India in 2006-2007, is believed to be among the architects of the revival of the SIMI networks. A one-time resident of Mumbai’s Mira Road area, he is alleged to have helped to build the high-intensity bombs which ripped through the city’s Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazaar area in 2003.

Supply of funds

SIMI ideologue CAM Basheer, who is thought to be living in Saudi Arabia using a fake passport, is believed to have provided funds which have allowed the Islamist organisation to operate despite the decimation of its leadership. A former Air India engineer who left his job to work for SIMI full time, Basheer is alleged to have financed the 2003 serial bombings, in which 48 people were killed and over 150 injured.

Factional politics?

In Madhya Pradesh, police arrested 13 leaders of the SIMI’s jihadist faction in March. Among them are SIMI’s top ideologue, Safdar Nagori, his brother Kamaruddin Nagori, and key recruiters Abdul Peedical Shibly and Hafiz Adnan Husain.

At a meeting in Ujjain in July 2007, Nagori and other members of SIMI’s factions decided to escalate jihadist activities against India. Qureshi was asked to liaise with Islamist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan for exploring the possibility of securing logistics assistance from the Taliban, which Nagori had long viewed as a model for SIMI. It is unclear if such links were ever established.

Intelligence sources said it was also possible that the bombings were intended to prevent a rival, anti-violence SIMI faction from capitalising on the arrests, and claiming leadership of the organisation’s rank and file.The former SIMI president, Shahid Badr Falahi, was instrumental in setting up the anti-violence SIMI faction, formed after a meeting at Aluva, Kerala, in January 2006. Led by West Bengal resident Mohammad Misbah-ul-Haq, members of this faction argue that jihadist violence has damaged the pursuit of SIMI’s core political objective — creation of an Islamic state.

Target Gujarat

Gujarat has been a high-priority target for SIMI jihadists and affiliate organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba ever since the 2002 communal pogrom in the State. Most SIMI cadre involved in these operations could never be arrested, raising the prospect that some, or all, are involved in Saturday’s bombings in Ahmedabad.

Maharashtra-based SIMI bomb maker Zulfikar Fayyaz Kagzi, for example, is thought to have built a sophisticated suitcase-bomb planted on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad express train in February 2006. However, an error in the timer circuit resulted in the bomb exploding only 12 hours after the scheduled detonation time, by which time train cleaning staff had deposited the suitcase in an empty corner of the Ahmedabad station.

Fayyaz is known to have caught an Iran Air flight to Tehran on May 9, 2006, and is thought to have escaped across the Zahedan border into Pakistan.

Over a dozen arrests

In May 2006, the Intelligence Bureau penetrated a massive SIMI-led effort to execute large-scale bombings in Gujarat. Investigators made over a dozen arrests after recovering 24 kg of lethal Research Department Explosive, packed in 10 computer central processing unit cases, along with 11 assault rifles and ammunition. SIMI operative Zabiuddin Ansari, who led the cell, succeeded in escaping the police after a high-speed car chase. He was later reported to have left for Bangladesh.

Training with Lashkar

Police later discovered that a Gujarat seminary student, Khalid Sardana, had been sending SIMI volunteers for training with the Lashkar in Jammu and Kashmir’s Poonch district since late 2001.

After the 2002 pogrom, the flow of volunteers increased. Sohail Mohamamd Sheikh and Zamir Ahmed Latif Chhabiwala, who were arrested by the Mumbai police in 2007, told investigators that they had discussed assassinating Gujarat police officers linked to the pogrom with the help of their Lashkar handlers. Sheikh and Chhabiwala are alleged to have trained at Lashkar-run facilities in Muzaffarabad and Bahawalpur, Pakistan, in the summer of 2005.

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