An arrested member of al Qaeda's India wing has been in touch with Pakistani jihadi outfits since the mid-1990s, and was aware of Jaish-e-Mohammed's plan to free terrorist leader Maulana Masood Azhar from jail, a Delhi Police charge-sheet says. The operative, Mohammed Abdul Rehman, was told by a Pakistani terrorist in 1999 that 10 JeM members were in Nepal, ready to strike to secure Azhar's release. Intelligence agencies remained clueless about Rehman and several others like him, who had a free run for nearly two decades. Giving Indian sleuths the slip, they travelled to Pakistan for terror training, returned, and got involved in radicalising and influencing youths for jihad.
An arrested member of al Qaeda’s India wing has been in touch with Pakistani jihadi outfits since the mid-1990s, and was aware of Jaish-e-Mohammed’s plan to free terrorist leader Maulana Masood Azhar from jail, a Delhi Police charge-sheet says.
The operative, Mohammed Abdul Rehman, was told by a Pakistani terrorist in 1999 that 10 JeM members were in Nepal, ready to strike to secure Azhar’s release.
Days later, the Indian Airlines flight IC 814 was hijacked from Nepal’s Kathmandu city and taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan.
The Indian government was forced to swap the JeM boss with the passengers who had been taken hostage.
Intelligence agencies remained clueless about Rehman and several others like him, who had a free run for nearly two decades. Giving Indian sleuths the slip, they travelled to Pakistan for terror training, returned, and got involved in radicalising and influencing youths for jihad.
Some of them also played host to Pakistani extremists who had come to carry out strikes.
The syndicate was finally busted last year. While five of those involved are in custody, 12 are still on the run. Sources say many of them may be running other al Qaeda sleeper cells, while some are suspected to be in Pakistan and Afghanistan - including Sana Ul Haq, the module’s leader.
The reports come in the same week that al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) urged Indian Muslims to carry out lone wolf attacks to kill government and security officials.
The AQIS is trying to attract South Asian youths while competing with Islamic State, which claimed last week’s deadly attack on a restaurant in Bangladesh.
The charge-sheet filed by Delhi Police last month on the suspected AQIS cell reveals that the members were veterans who attended terror training in Pakistan and were indoctrinated to carry out jihad.
Indian agencies went into a frenzy in April 2014 when al Qaeda announced its mission to spread its network in India, and planned a massive recruitment drive across the country.
A video showing the group’s top leader Ayman Al Zawahiri urging the outfit to expand its fight to India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh shook the security establishment, prompting the Intelligence Bureau (IB) to sound a countrywide alert that led to the busting of the terror ring in December 2015.
The charge-sheet says Rehman completed a PhD in Uttar Pradesh’s Deoband city in 1994, in Arabic and Hadees. He then started giving lectures on jihad, and was in touch with terrorists from across the border.
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