[Reader-list] The hunt for the Indian Mujahideen’s ‘al-Arbi’

[Nandini Sen]

It's the most unfortunate incident ever. Even an incredibly peace loving
person like me is feeling cheated at being forced to live a life where
terrorism and our acceptance of it has become a part of our lives. I saw the
Naseeruddin Shah starrer "A Wednesday". Is it time for the common man to
take the law in his own hands? It's a scary thought but if the terror
activities don't cease, it might well become a reality.
Regards,
Nandini

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 8:35 PM, TaraPrakash <taraprakash at gmail.com> wrote:

> The prophetic last line of this article published in Hindu on Saturday did
> not take time to materialize. The organization concerned, according to a
> mail received by several tv channels just before blasts in Delhi, punished
> us for our sins again that very evening.
>
>
>
>
>
> The hunt for the Indian Mujahideen's 'al-Arbi'
>
>
>
> Praveen Swami
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> A profile of the top bomb-maker Abdul Subhan Qureshi.
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> Less than forty eight hours before over thirty bombs tore Ahmedabad apart
> in July, Abdul Subhan Usman Qureshi caught an overnight train to Mumbai —
> and
> disappeared.
>
>
>
> Police forces across India, backed by the Intelligence Bureau, have made
> the hunt for the short, thin built man who the Ahmedabad bombers knew by the
> code-name
> 'Kasim', their top priority.
>
>
>
> Based on the interrogation of Shahbaz Husain, a Lucknow businessman alleged
> to have led the cell responsible for a string of urban bombings carried out
> by a Students Islamic Movement of India front organisation calling itself
> the Indian Mujahideen, investigators are now certain that Qureshi trained
> the
> bomb-makers who fabricated the bombs used in the terror offensive.
>
>
>
> Qureshi, police believe, was also the "al-Arbi" who signed e-mail
> manifestos issued by the Indian Mujahideen after each bombing — a finding
> supported by
> forensic detectives, who have determined that the rounded-'A' which
> "al-Arabi" used to sign the documents matches the rendering of the same
> character in
> his personal correspondence.
>
>
>
> Against the grain
>
>
>
> The story of SIMI's top bomb-maker sits ill with the narrative often used
> to explain why Islamist terrorism has grown in India.
>
>
>
> Qureshi studied at a secular school, not a seminary. He, unlike many
> inner-city Muslims, enjoyed access to both education and economic
> opportunity. Most
> important, Qureshi's political radicalisation seems not to have been
> connected to the win poles that marked the growth the jihad in India, the
> demolition
> of the Babri Masjid and the 2002 communal pogrom in Gujarat.
>
>
>
> Like many first-generation working-class migrants to Mumbai, Qureshi's
> parents—who hailed from Rampur in Uttar Pradesh—took education seriously.
>
>
>
> Qureshi graduated from the Antonio DeSouza High School, a church-run
> institution which caters to children from all major religious communities in
> 1988,
> securing a more-than-reasonable secondary school certificate average of
> 76.6 per cent. Interestingly, Qureshi's parents offered all their children
> access
> to educational opportunity — not just, as is common among religious
> conservatives, the boys. Qureshi's sisters, Asma and Safia, have Masters of
> Arts degrees;
> none of his three brothers, who also well-educated, appear to have been
> drawn to SIMI or other Islamist groups.
>
>
>
> In the autumn of 1992 — months before Mumbai was hit by a murderous Shiv
> Sena-led communal pogrom which followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid —
> Qureshi
> began studies at the Bharatiya Vidyapeeth in Navi Mumbai. Neither the
> communal pogrom, nor the serial bombings which followed them, appear to have
> directly
> touched Qureshi's life. In 1995, he obtained a diploma in industrial
> electronics, and landed a part-time job at String Computers in Mazgaon.
> Later, in
> 1996, he went on to earn a specialised software maintenance qualification
> from the CMS Institute in Marol.
>
>
>
> Armed with these qualifications, Qureshi had little difficulty finding
> work. He joined Radical Solutions, an independent computer firm operating
> out of
> the upmarket Fort area in south Mumbai in November, 1996, on a starting
> salary of Rs. 2,450 per month. By the accounts of his co-workers, Qureshi
> was an
> exceptional worker — an assessment that is borne out by his resume. Just
> three years into his professional life, Qureshi succeeded in quadrupling his
> pay.
> He handled several major independent projects, including an intranet
> implementation for Bharat Petro-Chemicals carried out by Wipro in 1999, and
> then landed
> a job with computer major Datamatics.
>
>
>
> But then, Qureshi suddenly decided to leave in his job. In his March 26,
> 2001, letter, he offered the firm only "I wish to inform you," the letter
> read,
> "that I have decided to devote one complete year to pursue religious and
> spiritual matters."
>
>
>
> Qureshi's friends and family claim to have no knowledge of what led him to
> make the decision. His family claims not to have met since SIMI was
> proscribed
> later that year. This seems improbable: Qureshi's youngest child, with his
> wife Aafia, is, after all, just two and a half years old.
>
>
>
> A career in terror
>
>
>
> Mumbai police investigators have begun to reconstruct Qureshi's career in
> terror. No one is certain just how he was recruited, but by 1998, Qureshi
> appears
> to have been a committed SIMI activist. He was charged, that year, with
> defacing public property, by pasting SIMI posters. Later, he went on to edit
> one
> of SIMI's house-magazines, Islamic Voice, from New Delhi.
>
>
>
> Police sources told The Hindu that Qureshi participated in the October,
> 1999, SIMI conference in October, 1999. Sheikh Yasin, the head of the
> Palestinian
> Hamas and the Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islamic chief Qazi Husain Ahmad, were among
> those who delivered speeches, through telephone links. Seven-year-old Gulrez
> Siddiqui was reported to have been trotted out in front of the estimated
> 20,000-strong crowd to read out this couplet: "Islam ka ghazi, butshikan,
> Mera
> sher, Osama bin Laden" (Warrior for Islam, destroyer of idols / My lion,
> Osama bin Laden)".
>
>
>
> SIMI's growing links with the global jihadist movement became increasingly
> clear in the months and years that followed. In January, 2000, for example,
> police
> in West Bengal arrested Chinese national Abdul Rahman just after he crossed
> the Bahirhat border with Bangaldesh. Investigators learned that Rahman, who
> had escaped from a prison in China's Xinjiang region where he had been
> serving time for the murder of a police officer, had been brought to India
> to train
> Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives. His handlers Aziz-ul-Haq and Nazrul Islam were
> both SIMI members. Later, in May, 2001, eight SIMI members involved in an
> abortive
> plot to bomb the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's headquarters in Nagpur were
> found to have trained with the Hizb ul-Mujahideen in Jammu and Kashmir.
>
>
>
> By the time of SIMI's 1999 Aurangabad convention, which Qureshi is believed
> to have helped organise, many of the speeches delivered by delegates were
> frankly
> inflammatory. "Islam is our nation, not India," thundered Mohammad Amir
> Shakeel Ahmad, one of over a dozen SIMI-linked Lashkar operatives arrested
> in 2005
> for smuggling in military-grade explosives and assault rifles for a planned
> series of attacks in Gujarat. Among those listening to the speech was
> Mohammad
> Azam Ghauri, one of the co-founders of the Lashkar's India operations.
> Ghauri, some SIMI members present in Aurangabad say, was offered SIMI's
> leadership,
> but refused.
>
>
>
> Qureshi was, investigators say, one of the principal organisers of SIMI's
> last public conference in 2001. SIMI leaders told the estimated 25,000
> followers
> who attended the conference that the time had come for Indian Muslims to
> launch an armed jihad which would have the establishment of a caliphate at
> its
> final aim.
>
>
>
> In the wake of the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in
> September, 2001, SIMI activists organised demonstrations attacking the
> United States
> of America for being an "enemy of Islam." SIMI literature hailed Osama as a
> "true mujahid [Islamic warrior]" and celebrated the demolition of the
> Bamiyan
> Buddhas by the Taliban. Muslims were exhorted to "trample the infidels."
>
>
>
> Finding Qureshi — as well as figures like Qayamuddin Kapadia, the missing
> Vadodara based computer-graphics artist who police believe led the SIMI cell
> which
> targeted Surat — could prove key to preventing the next big terror
> bombings. But the threat will not end with his arrest. Investigations of
> other SIMI-linked
> terror cells have thrown up evidence which suggests Qureshi trained several
> hundred recent recruits to the Islamist group's terror cells, at camps held
> across India from 2007 onwards.
>
>
>
> India, it seems probable, will be compelled to live with this threat for
> many years to come.
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Nandini C.Sen
Senior Lecturer,
Dept. of English.
Bharati College.
Delhi University.