Indian Mujahideen is just hardline version of SIMI
17 Aug 2008, 0142 hrs IST, Pradeep Thakur & Vishwa Mohan,TNN
NEW DELHI: With the solving of the Ahmedabad blast case, investigators have also been successful in cracking the IM code. Indian Mujahideen (IM) is the hardline faction of Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) that broke away in 2005 to protest against the diffidence of the moderate faction about declaring a full-scale war on India.
Hardliners, led by its general secretary Safdar Nagori who was nabbed along with 10 key associates in Indore last March, wanted jihad against India on the same lines that al-Qaida was fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, say investigators.
Confirming the cracking of the IM code, Gujarat DGP PC Pande said,
"IM is nothing but SIMI activists who were behind the serial blasts in Ahmedabad." He said the hardliners first removed 'I' from SIMI, reducing it to SIM before opting for only 'IM' as their visiting card.
While the choice of Mujahideen holy warrior was in keeping with the group's avowed objective to wage holy war against non-believers,
the prefix 'Indian' served another purpose that of helping the group's mentor, Pakistan's ISI, to claim that it had no role in the acts of terrorism in India.
It is important to recall that the email sent on behalf of IM warning of the terror attack on Ahmedabad minutes before the blasts went to great lengths to emphasize the group's claim to be an indigenous affair, with no link from ISI-supported gangs like LeT and Jaish.
"The Ahmedabad blasts were planned out in the city at the home of one of SIMI activists," said Ashish Bhatia, head of the probe team and joint commissioner of police.
The drift away from the 'moderates', who lay stress on speeches and propaganda to achieve the objective to make Islam the dominant system in India, dates to the 90s and was facilitated by the community's anger against the Babri demolition.
But the complete identification with the objective of global jihad and embrace of the strategy to inflict "a thousand cuts" had to wait till the latter part of the decade. The rift was complete by 2005.
Fresh evidence of the involvement of SIMI activists, a faction of whom now banded under IM, comes within days of the refusal of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Tribunal to extend the ban on the fundamentalist outfit inspired by the Deobandi school of Islamic thought and which was formed in the flush of the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979.
SIMI general secretary Safdar Nagori, who refused to toe the moderates' line of shunning violence, led the hardliners in setting up of terror camps and organizing blasts across India.
After the split in the SIMI camp, the hardliners met in Ujjain just before the serial blasts in Mumbai (July 11, 2006) and continued their terror campaign with strikes in Malegaon, Samjhauta Express, Hyderabad, Ajmer, Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad. The hardliners also began organizing terrorist training camps in the forests of many states starting with Kerala, Karnataka, Indore and to be followed in all states where the underground cadres of the banned outfit had established a base.
Investigation in the Ahmedabad case has revealed that a training camp was organised at Ernakulam in December 2007 and January 2008 under the leadership of Safdar Nagori. SIMI youths from the southern states participated in the camp. The mastermind of the Ahmedabad serial blasts, Bashar, acted as the chief ideologue of the outfit who motivated cadres. At the training camps, terror interns were given a crash course in making of explosives with locally available bomb materials, a complete survival tactics in jungle warfare and how to survive interrogation in case of arrest.
The serial blasts in Ahmedabad marked the third time that the Indian Mujahideen had claimed responsibility for the act. The previous blasts in which they had claimed responsibility included the strikes in UP courts in Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow in November last year and later in Jaipur on May 13.
Nagori was largely responsible for organizing the hardliners as he enjoyed good working relationship with Pakistan's ISI and with terror outfits both in Pakistan and in Bangladesh such as LeT, Jaish-e-Mohammed and HuJI.
Nagori, on the run since 2001 when SIMI was banned, had managed to recruit from the upwardly mobile section of the society, many of them trained engineers, doctors and IT professionals. The hardliners soon spread influence in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, UP, Bihar and West Bengal.
After the arrest of Nagori and his top lieutenants in Indore, the outfit suffered initial setback but Ahmedabad mastermind Bashar reorganized the cadres assisted by a former Wipro executive who is also on the run to motivate and orchestrate serial blasts.
It was not clear that the former Wipro staffer was Shibly Peedical Abdul, a computer engineer from Kerala who escaped a Karnataka raid on terror suspects this year. Abdul is said to have helped organise the July 2006 bombings in Mumbai.
Indian Mujahideen is just hardline version of SIMI-India-The Times of India