In further indication that the 18 youths arrested three weeks ago on terrorism charges from Hubli, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Nanded may have been aligned to an old, Hyderabad-origin terror network based in the Gulf and Pakistan, the Bangalore police have named a 49-year-old man wanted by the Interpol as one of their contacts.
In the course of remand requests filed on September 13 for custody of one of the arrested youths, 27-year-old Dr Zafar Iqbal Sholapur, the police have stated that he met Mohammed Farhatullah Ghori in Karachi. A former Hyderabad resident, Ghori is on the Interpol’s wanted list for terror offences, and arrest warrants against him are pending in India. He is believed to be the maternal uncle of Abdul Shahid alias Shahid Bilal, an operative of Lashkar-e-Toiba and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI).
The Bangalore Police Crime Branch that is investigating the case believes the arrested youths were plugged into a Saudi Arabia- and Pakistan-based Lashkar and HuJI network containing several former Hyderabad elements.
Sources said Iqbal had identified Ghori from photographs shown to him as one of the persons he had met in Karachi during the course of a visit via Iran between December 2011 and January 2012.
Along with 25-year-old Abdul Hakeem Jamadar, Iqbal is being investigated for allegedly undergoing some kind of training in Pakistan during the secret trip that does not reflect on their passports.
Ghori is believed to have met Iqbal using the pseudonym Abdul Rahman and put the young doctor in touch with alleged ISI contacts. Police claim during the training, Iqbal and Hakeem were indoctrinated not just towards intelligence gathering for the LeT but also suicide missions.
Ghori’s name has figured in investigations into the Akshardham temple attack case of September 2003 and the suicide bomb attack on a Special Task Force office in Hyderabad in October 2005, as a Saudi Arabia-based financier of the attacks. Nephew Shahid Bilal was mysteriously killed along with elder brother Abdul Samad in Karachi on August 30, 2007.
One of Bilal’s brothers, Abdul Zahed, also an accused in the Hyderabad STF attack case, told investigators in December 2005 that Ghori alias Abu Sufiyan was sending money for the activities of the Shahid Bilal network.
The 18 youths arrested three weeks ago from four cities have allegedly also revealed that they were in regular touch with another Hyderabad resident, this time based in Saudi Arabia, Abdul Majid — also Shahid Bilal’s brother — and Abu Hanzala alias Siddique Bin Osman, who in turn had links to Ghori.
The investigations indicate that the old Hyderabad network allegedly involved in sending youths to Pakistan for terror training in the latter half of the last century and the early part of this century had quietly revived, belying the belief that it had died with Shahid and Samad in 2007.
Police are trying to ascertain the identities of two other persons named by the arrested youths — the Saudi Arabia-based Furkhan and Zaki alias Ustad, who met the youths frequently in Bangalore.
The 18 youths were likely radicalised through a combination of material on the Internet, and direct contact with Zaki as well as a former SIMI man identified as Dr Usman Ghani from Hubli, who is suspected to have played a role in the lives of SIMI youths arrested in 2008 from Hubli.
“Unlike in recent cases of open-source jihad, where individuals ventured on the path of terrorism on their own after being inspired by literature on the Internet, these youths went much further and were sucked into a real global terror network,” police sources said.
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