[Reader-list] To Bangalore, with hate - Praveen Swami

[Pawan Durani]

http://www.hindu.com/2010/04/22/stories/2010042252241000.htm

To Bangalore, with hate

Praveen Swami
Police hunting for the perpetrators of last week's attacks on the
Chinnaswamy stadium in Bangalore are revisiting the 2008 serial
bombings in the city.

“HAPPY Vishu, Malayalees and Pravasees,” reads the cheerful red banner
running across the web page set up by an enthusiastic resident of
Pallikera in Kerala. Photos offer a glimpse of the small town's
charms: men with gym-honed biceps, the Bekal fort, and, improbably,
photos of two western tourists hugging the billboard of a local
celebrity.

Fifteen years ago, a young man named Sarfaraz Nawaz left Pallikera on
a journey that would lead, step by step, to the serial bombings in
Bangalore in June, 2008. From his story, and that of his associates in
south India's Islamist networks, investigators have pieced together a
fascinating account of how multiple jihadist cells formed across the
region; linked to each other only loosely through leaders, who in turn
were connected to Islamist groups in the Gulf and the
Lashkar-e-Taiba's commanders in Pakistan.

But the story also demonstrates disturbing gaps in intelligence; gaps
that allowed jihadists to mobilise and recruit members, and prepare
for attacks. Following last week's bombings at the M. Chinnaswamy
stadium in Bangalore, the police in Karnataka have renewed the search
for over a dozen individuals linked to Nawaz's networks who eluded
arrest after the June 2008 serial bombings in India's
information-technology capital.

Born in 1977, the quiet, scholarly Nawaz joined the Students Islamic
Movement of India in 1995. In 1996, he left home to study at the
famous Dar-ul-Uloom Nadwat-ul-Ullema seminary in Lucknow. But he found
its clerical austerity stifling, and returned to Kochi to study at
Accel Computers. Fluent in Malayalam, English, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic,
Nawaz began writing regularly in the SIMI-linked Kerala magazine
Nerariv and the pro-National Development Front newspaper Thejus.

By March 2000, Nawaz had become SIMI's office secretary in New Delhi.
His friends included Safdar Nagori, the imprisoned head of SIMI's
jihadist faction; fugitive Indian Mujahideen commander Abdul Subhan
Qureshi; and Saqib Nachan, charged with a bombing on a Mumbai train
that left eleven dead.

In 2001, Nawaz took a job with computer-services firm Future Outlooks
at Ibra in Oman. Later, he joined the Ibn Sina Medical Institute in
Dubai — a facility run by a former president of SIMI's Kerala chapter,
Dr. Abdul Ghafoor — as its public relations officer. Abdul Aziz,
another former SIMI member from Malappuram in Kerala, helped Nawaz get
a job at the al-Mihad centre in 2006. In July 2006, he shifted to the
al-Noor Education Trust in Muscat.

Muscat was the hub from which the 2008 Bangalore bombings were planned
and financed. In the summer of 2007, Bangalore Police investigators
say, Nawaz met Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Mohammad Rehan
in Muscat. Introduced by common friends, the two men discussed armed
retaliation against anti-Muslim violence in India. Nawaz refused his
offer to train in Pakistan but agreed to recruit Kerala residents to
the Lashkar's cause.

Jihad at the ginger plantation

The police do not know precisely what led Nawaz to work with the
Lashkar but the fraught communal climate probably was a factor. In
2002, a drunken New Year's fight in the beach village of Marad sparked
off violence that lasted a year, claiming thirteen lives. Hundreds of
Muslim families fled the area. Nawaz was not in India at the time but
he turned to a man who was.

Tadiyantavide Nasir joined the far-right Islamic Sevak Sangh in 1991,
at just fifteen years of age. Police records document his chaotic,
violent life: a murder charge, of which he was acquitted; an abortive
attempt to assassinate the former Kerala Chief Minister, E.K. Nayanar;
the burning of a Tamil Nadu bus to protest the arrest of ISS leader
Abdul Nasser Maudany on terrorism charges; and a bombing outside the
Kozhikode Press Club to highlight his cause.

Nasir was not a SIMI member but knew many of its members well. From
2005, Nasir began to tap Nawaz for funds to set up a jihad training
camp on a remote ginger plantation near Hasatota in Karnataka's Kodagu
district.

In 2007, the police say, he met key SIMI operative Qureshi — who,
using the code-name Tauqir, liaised between the Indian Mujahideen's
regional cells. Later, Nasir's cell supplied ammonium nitrate and
integrated-circuit timers to the Indian Mujahideen's Mangalore-based
commander Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri. Shahbandri's lieutenant Mohammad
Zarar Siddi Bawa is the key suspect in the 2010 German Bakery bombing
at Pune.

In 2007, Nawaz met Nasir in Kerala and discussed plans for an attack
on Bangalore. By 2008, investigators say, the Lashkar's Rehan offered
some $2,500 to finance the operation. Islamists living in the Gulf,
notably fugitive terror commander CAM Bashir, raised additional funds.
That March, Nawaz travelled home to Kerala. He also travelled to
Bangalore, to look at possible targets. Nasir's group later tested two
bombs near Kozhikode.

On July 23, 2008, Nasir and his group arrived in Bangalore in a hired
Scorpio jeep, loaded with fourteen improvised explosive devices. Nine
went off two days later, killing two people, injuring twenty.

Later that year, Nasir sent five cadre to Jammu and Kashmir, to train
with a Lashkar commander in the Lolab valley near Kupwara. Nawaz had
set up the training opportunity but police and Army personnel soon
detected the strangers. Abdul Faiz and Mohammad Fayyaz from Kannur,
Muhammad Yasir from Kochi, and Abdul Rahim from Malappuram were shot
dead. Abdul Jabbar, the fifth volunteer, is under trial.

Bus tickets found on the body of one of the jihadists helped unravel
the operation. Nasir fled to Bangladesh, aided by Lashkar operatives
based out of Dhaka. It was not until last year that the Research and
Analysis Wing located Nawaz in Oman, setting off a transnational
manhunt that led to the arrest of Nasir and the Lashkar's
Karachi-origin resident commander in Dhaka, Mubashir Shahid.

SIMI's jihadist faction had hoped the infrastructure set up by Nawaz
and Nasir would help a separate cell that it had given birth to in
Bangalore a decade ago. In 2000, a young SIMI ikhwan (full time
worker) Peedical Abdul Shibli had moved to Bangalore to work at IT
giant Tata Elexi. Recruited by the Islamist group in 1997 while he was
a student in Thiruvananthapuram, Shibli was among Nawaz's key
activists.

Shibli soon set up Sarani, a hostel for north Kerala migrants to
Bangalore, offering them an Islamic environment. It ran in Bangalore's
Vivek Nagar area, before moving to larger premises in Eejipura and
then Bismillah Nagar. Kerala SIMI ideologues would often lecture
residents here. Few Sarani residents, though, were stereotypical
fanatics. Shibli's key recruit, Wipro-General Electric employee Yahya
Kamakutty, for example, travelled to the U.S. at least thrice in
2000-2001 alone.

In 2001, following its public declarations of support for Al-Qaeda,
SIMI was proscribed; but Sarani continued to run. SIMI chief Safdar
Nagori visited the hostel in 2002 for three days, as did several other
senior ideologues, unmonitored by local intelligence services.

By early 2006, Shibli was working full-time for SIMI's now-covert
jihadists. In April 2006, SIMI held a secret meeting in Bangalore.
Later, at a meeting held in Ujjain from July 4-7 2006, SIMI committed
itself to an Islamist jihad against the Indian state. In April 2007,
SIMI held a training camp at Castle Rock near Hubli, under the cover
of hosting an outdoors event for Sarani residents. Another camp was
held in Bijapur in June 2007, followed by a meeting at Dharwar in
August.

Police failure

Recruits received bomb-making and firearms instruction from Subhan at
camps held near Indore in September and November, 2007. Instruction in
assembling fuel bombs was provided in December 2007 at a camp held
outside Ernakulam. Of the forty-odd individuals the police believe
attended these camps, over half were Bangalore residents. The police
arrested several, including Shibly, Kamakutty, Husain and Raziuddin
Nasir, who planned to bomb western tourists in Goa in the winter of
2008 but over half are still missing.

Many believe Bangalore's police simply did not take the threat
seriously enough. No effort was made to install even basic defensive
measures like closed-circuit cameras around the Chinnaswamy stadium.
But there is a larger failure, too. For all the technological
investments in intelligence made since the November 2008 carnage in
Mumbai, the attacks in Pune and Bangalore have made clear that the
police are yet to penetrate the jihadist cells responsible for the
terror offensive from 2005 onwards — a failure that bodes ill for the
future.