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From seminary student to SIMI jihadist

NEW DELHI: Abul Bashar Qasmi was packed off to the local madrasa at the age of six, in the hope that piety, education and his teachers’ rod would keep him out of trouble.

Mafioso Abu Salem Ansari was about the only resident of the impoverished Uttar Pradesh village of Sarai Mir who had ever made it big. Drugs and violence had ever since been seen by many young people as a ticket to a better life. Illahi’s father, Abu Bakr, who made a living selling hard-boiled eggs on the pavements of the local market, wanted to make sure his 1982-born son did not go down this road.

His efforts came to nothing. Illahi has now become the second Sarai Mir resident to make the headlines, again for the wrong reasons. Police in Gujarat have claimed he was the principal ideologue and organiser behind the Indian Mujahideen cell, which organised last month’s bombings in Ahmedabad and has close links with the modules that executed earlier attacks in Jaipur and Bangalore.

Qasmi’s journey into the Students Islamic Movement of India began in his late teens, when he was studying to obtain clerical qualifications at the famous Dar-ul-Uloom madrasa at Deoband, the seminary from which jihadist organisations like the Taliban and the Jaish-e-Mohammad claim ideological descent, but whose authorities have over the last year spearheaded a campaign against terrorism.

Soon after qualifying as a Mufti, one qualified to interpret the shariah, Qasmi began working at SIMI’s office at Zakir Nagar in New Delhi. Later, he taught at seminaries in Indore and Bangalore, actively recruiting for SIMI.

In late-2001, Qasmi was despatched to work for the Tehreek Tahaffuz-e-Shaair-e-Islam, a neo-fundamentalist coalition committed to the protection of Islamic monuments and symbols. He was charged with editing the TTSI magazine Nishaan-e-Rah or Signposts, which drew its name from the Egyptian Islamist Syed Qutb’s seminal manifesto for the modern jihadist movement.

Soon after the Gujarat communal pogrom, TTSI chief Maulana Mohammad Naseeruddin started looking for recruits to deliver vengeance. The Karachi-based ganglord Rasool Khan Party, who draws his nickname from Gujarati argot for a business associate, had a meeting with the cleric in 1992-1993 in Hyderabad, where he lived posing as a Gujarati cloth merchant to evade a crackdown on organised crime in Ahmedabad.

Khan told Maulana Naseeruddin about emerging plans to assassinate Hindutva politicians who had helped to organise the violence in Gujarat. Mufti Sufian Patangia, a Salafist cleric who ran a small seminary in the Kalpur area, had already raised some volunteers for training at Lashkar-e-Taiba facilities in Pakistan. But more men, Khan said, were needed. Naseeruddin and Mohammad Abdul Rauf, a Majlis Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen leader long associated with Islamist movements in Hyderabad, joined hands to make that possible.

Over a dozen men from Hyderabad and Ahmedabad were eventually flown to training camps in Pakistan. Qasmi is thought to have played a key role in this operation.

Police first learned of Qasmi’s links to Islamists in Hyderabad after the arrest of Mohtasin Billa, an engineering student who was alleged to be linked to the perpetrators of the 2006 serial bombings in Hyderabad. For reasons that are still unclear, though, Uttar Pradesh authorities never followed up this information.

Fresh information emerged on Qasmi during investigation of the synchronised bombings of three courtroom buildings in Uttar Pradesh last year. Police later arrested Mohammad Khalid Mujahid and Tariq Kazmi, who were alleged to have handled one of the three Indian Mujahideen cells which carried out the attacks. Mujahid, who had trained with the Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami in eastern Jammu and Kashmir in 2003-3004, named Qasmi one of the operation’s overall coordinators. Police in Uttar Pradesh showed no great interest in following up this lead either.

Even during the interrogation of top SIMI ideologue Safdar Nagori, who was arrested in Indore earlier this year, Qasmi once more found mention as a key figure in the proscribed organisation’s jihadist operations.

However, sources in the Uttar Pradesh government said, fears of provoking communal riots in Azamgarh led authorities to shoot down police calls to raid his home and detain his associates.

Saturday’s arrests in Gujarat are unlikely to end the terror campaign that has targeted cities across India since 2006.

Mumbai resident Mohammad Altaf Subhan, the crack bomb-maker who fabricated the improvised explosive devices used in Ahmedabad and Surat, is still missing.

So, too, are over a dozen recruits he trained at secret camps in Ernakulam, Hubli, Indore and Halol this winter, the last in January 2008, where operational plans for the Gujarat serial bombings were put in place. Sajid Mansoori, Younus Mansoori and Shamsuddin Sheikh, who, the Gujarat police say, were critical to stitching up the operation under Subhan’s command, are all thought to have been present at this camp.

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