Jihadist Violence: The Indian Threat - 2: An examination of a terrorist group, a loosely organized indigenous Islamist militant network known as the Indian Mujahideen
By Stephen Tankel
Evolution of Indian Jihadism
Examining the evolution of the Indian jihadist movement necessitates briefly exploring the atmosphere in which it emerged and elements that drove its genesis. Seeds of Homegrown Terrorism India was founded as a secular pluralist country and these values are enshrined in its constitution, which guaranteed equality and prohibited discrimination on the basis of religious, race, caste, or gender. Yet Muslims have suffered from relative deprivation, are sometimes suspected of harboring loyalty to Pakistan, and have been the victims of communal violence over the years.
Many educated Muslims left during Partition and a significant portion of those who remained were poor. Some Muslims in Uttar Pradesh and the central areas, who had been champions of Pakistan but did not migrate there, were apprehensive about how they would be treated. Concerns focused on issues such as the freedom to worship and to continue operating religious institutions.
To assuage their concerns, provisos were included in the new constitution enshrining these rights. However, economic and educational issues were neglected. In other words, Muslims were given religious freedom, but neglected or discriminated against in other areas. This contributed to economic deprivation relative to others in India. According to the Sachar Committee, commissioned in 2005 to examine the social, economic, and educational conditions of Indian Muslims, Muslim graduates had the highest unemployment rate of any socioreligious group. Overall, Muslims were found to be underrepresented at elite educational institutions as well as in the Indian Administrative Service (3 percent), the Indian Foreign Service (1.8 percent) and the Indian Police Service (4 percent).
According to one estimate, the area where Muslims were overrepresented was in prison. Such widespread Muslim marginalization created the space for jihadism. Direct and indirect threats to Muslim communities, especially in northern India, from a rising Hindu nationalist movement catalyzed its emergence. Hindu nationalists promoted a definition of India as a Hindu, rather than a secular, nation. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Organization, formed in 1925 to oppose British colonialism and Muslim separatism, was the progenitor of the Hindu nationalist movement.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Council of Hinduism, founded in 1964, is the most militant offshoot of the RSS. Hindu nationalists increased the intensity of their anti-Muslim rhetoric in the 1960s and began launching campaigns to dismantle mosques across the country.
Pogroms targeting Muslims communities sometimes accompanied these activities, and conferences organized by the RSS and VHP also often culminated in rioting against Muslims and other non-Hindus. Communal riots were a feature of life for many Indians since Partition and never entirely one-sided, but grew in frequency and ferocity during the 1980s and 1990s.11 Bajrang Dal, the VHP’s youth wing, activated in 1981 and soon was at forefront of communal violence against Muslims. In some instances, the police, which are overwhelmingly Hindu, abetted or participated in these activities?
The VHP launched the Ramjanmabhoomi movement in 1984 to build a Hindu temple near the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh (UP). Constructed by the first Mughal emperor of India in the sixteenth century on a site Hindus believe was the birthplace of the deity Lord Ram (Ramjanmabhoomi in Hindi), it had become a communal flashpoint. The mosque was closed for several decades, despite Muslims’ legal efforts to reopen it, when the VHP launched its campaign. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or Indian People’s Party, founded in 1980 as the political offspring of the RSS, leveraged the ensuing tensions and reaped electoral gains.14 Meanwhile, the VHP made legal claims that hundreds of historical mosques were built on the sites of Hindu temples, fueling the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, a wider campaign of mosque demolition throughout the country and the communal violence that often accompanied it.
A significant number of Indian Muslims who became involved in Islamist militancy came from the Students Islamic Movement of India. SIMI was founded in 1977 at Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh as the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH), part of an effort to revitalize the Students Islamic Organization (SIO) that had been founded as the first JIH student wing in 1956. SIMI built on SIO networks in Uttar Pradesh and conducted outreach to JIH-linked Muslim student groups in other localities such as Andhra Pradesh, Bengal, Bihar, and Kerala.16 From the outset, SIMI was heavily influenced by Sayyed Abdul ‘Ala Maududi, a journalist and Islamist ideologue, who established Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 to be the vanguard of an Islamic revolution. He called for jihad to establish states governed by sharia (Islamic law) and declared that those who tolerated living in a secular state consigned themselves to hell in the hereafter.17 Maududi chose to live in Pakistan after Partition.
Members who remained in India reorganized themselves and in 1948 their organization officially became the JIH.JIH initially embraced Maududi’s radical ideology, but over time began to embrace the secular state. This embrace occurred amid the rising Hindu nationalist movement and violence that accompanied it, and was partially informed by the belief that a secular state was a necessary alternative to a communal Hindu regime. Such a position put the JIH at odds with SIMI, whose leaders were disturbed by what they viewed to be a revisionist posture.
The two separated in 1981. Over the next ten years, many SIMI members became increasingly alienated from the mainstream political culture and more prone to extremist rhetoric. The simultaneous democratization of Indian politics undercut establishment figures throughout the country, including Muslim leaders, whose credibility was also eroded in the eyes of some followers by their failure to stand against the rising Hindu nationalist tide. The demonopolisation of Islam subverted the authority of the Ulema (Muslim scholars) and created space for radical actors, who took matters into their own hands. However, though the Indian jihadist movement was homegrown, external actors encouraged and abetted it Nurturing an Indigenous Movement India and Pakistan have fought three conventional wars and engaged in a limited conflict after Pakistan’s invasion of Kargil in 1999.
Pakistan relied on non-state proxies during its first war against India fought over the disputed region of Kashmir, and has continued to use non-state Islamist militants from its own population to achieve geopolitical objectives ever since. After the first Kashmir war concluded, Islamabad abetted indigenous separatists in Indian administered Kashmir, effectively waging a covert campaign to foment an uprising. This effort sparked the second war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Pakistani jihadist groups formed in the 1980s when the country became a staging ground for the Afghan Mujahideen fighting against the communist regime in Kabul and Soviet troops propping it up. The Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) took charge of coordinating this effort. In 1983, the Zia ul-Haq regime in Pakistan began considering how to replicate the Afghan experience in Indian-administered Kashmir. To this end, it not only trained extant and inchoate indigenous Kashmiri groups, but also intended to deploy the Pakistani jihadist groups that had formed to fight against the Soviets.
Despite this planning, the uprising that began in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1988 was indigenous. Islamabad moved quickly to exploit the situation, support the Kashmiri militant groups that emerged and ultimately reorient the conflict toward one dominated by groups that favored joining Pakistan over independence. By the early 1990s, Pakistani jihadist groups established during the Afghan jihad were fighting in Kashmir in greater numbers. The most notable of these included Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI) or the Islamic Jihad Movement Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
These proxies were qualitatively different from those Pakistan had supported in the past in terms of their intent and capabilities to wage a pan- Islamist jihad that included but was not limited to Indian-administered Kashmir. Whereas indigenous Kashmiri groups, most notably the Pakistan-supported Islamist Hizb ul Mujahideen, were prepared to offer training to Indian Muslims from elsewhere in the country, these Pakistani groups actively sought to build networks to support terrorism against the Indian hinterland.
Neither India nor Pakistan has engineered an indigenous militant movement in the other country from scratch, but both have cultivated such entities. In addition to supporting indigenous and Pakistani jihadists fighting in Indian-administered Kashmir, Islamabad also historically supported Indian minorities waging ethnic and religious separatist struggles elsewhere in the country, including Sikhs in Punjab and various insurgent entities in the country’s northeast. Notably, New Delhi did the same, providing assistance to Baloch, Pashtun, and Sindhi separatists in Pakistan at various times. Before the 1990s, however, no organized Islamist movement committed to violence existed in India outside Kashmir.
Hence Pakistani support for such actors was circumscribed. As a nascent network of would-be Indian jihadists outside Kashmir began to activate in the 1990s, both the Pakistani state and its jihadist proxies promoted its growth. Phase IIn early December 1992, Indian officials granted permission for a VHP rally in front of the Babri mosque on the condition that participants not damage it. Instead, once gathered, a mob demolished the mosque, catalyzing communal riots in several Indian cities, including Gujarat and Mumbai. According to a commission of inquiry led by Justice B. N. Srikrishna (the Srikrishna Commission) and constituted by the government in Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, Hindu rallies celebrating the mosque’s destructions further aggravated Muslim sentiments and contributed to frenzied protests.
Islamists fanned the flames of anti-Hindu sentiment. On the other side, the Shiv Sena and other Hindu nationalist organizations entered the fray, further polarizing the situation and escalating communal violence. The police took a heavy-handed approach, directed primarily toward Muslim protestors, which only intensified the violence, further embittered many Indian Muslims. About a thousand people were killed by the time the Bombay Riots, as they are known, ended. Approximately two-thirds of them were Muslim, according to the Srikrishna Commission, which indicted the Shiv Sena for its role in the violence.24 The episode became a core grievance for the Indian jihadist movement.D-Company Draws First Blood No Indian jihadist movement existed at this stage. The first Muslim 16 Stephen Tankel actor to strike back was a criminal, not an Islamist. Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar is the Muslim leader of South Asia’s largest crime syndicate, known as D-company. His criminal associate, Tiger Memon, engineered a lethal series of thirteen car, scooter, and suitcase bomb blasts in Mumbai (Bombay at the time) in March 1993. The attacks, which hit the Bombay Stock Exchange, three hotels, and a host of other targets, killed 257 people and injured more than seven hundred. This remains the largest and most deadly coordinated terrorist incident in India’s history. Expatriate Indian smugglers based in the United Arab Emirates financed the attacks. Memon spearheaded the recruitment of Muslim youths to execute them.
Nineteen of the youth were sent via Dubai, where D-Company has robust networks, to Pakistan for training in the use of weapons and bomb making. It is unlikely an attack of this magnitude could have been executed without the support of Dawood’s criminal infrastructure. Ibrahim, Tiger Memon, and others from D-Company relocated to Karachi. D-Company is still mentioned frequently in media reports as supporting militant activities in India, but little hard evidence supports its enduring importance. However, the link between organized criminality in general and Islamist militancy did remain a lasting feature of the Indian jihadist movement. The Asif Raza Commando Brigade (ARCF), formed by gangsters-cum-jihadists and discussed later in this section, constitutes one of the two major building blocks of the movement. The Tanzim Islahul Muslimeen (TIM), or Organization for the Improvement of Muslims, is the other.
TIM: Wellspring of LeT’s Indian Networks Activists from the Gorba faction of the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadith in Mumbai formed the TIM in the Mominpora slum in summer 1985. They were motivated by communal riots that had erupted the previous year in Bhiwandi and spread to Mumbai and Thane after a saffron flag (a symbol of Hindu nationalism) was placed atop a mosque. The violence left almost three hundred people dead and fueled a growing belief among those who belonged to the Jamaat’s Gorba faction that India was a Hindu fundamentalist state. They converged on the need for a Muslim self-defense militia and the possibility of taking revenge for Hindu nationalist violence. Toward this end, an obscure West Bengal-based cleric named Abu Masood announced the creation of TIM.
Three key figures were present at the Mominpora meetings: Jalees Ansari, Azam Ghauri, and Abdul Karim (aka Tunda). Ansari was the son of a Mumbai textile mill worker. He earned a medical degree from Sion Medical College and became a practicing physician, but was deeply affected by his experiences with communalism, often complaining that his Hindu colleagues did not treat Muslim patients with the proper care.31 Muhammad Azam Ghauri was from an impoverished family in Hyderabad, where he was involved in low level criminality and belonged to a Maoist group before discovering religion. Karim was born in Delhi, but grew up near the town of Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh before moving to Mumbai, where he established a small dyeing business.
Despite forming TIM to be an armed defense militia, its members largely confined themselves to parading around the grounds of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) where, modeling the RSS, they trained with lathis, the long heavy wooden sticks often used as weapons in India. However, Ansari, Ghauri, and Karim were already training with explosives, the latter having earned his nickname after a bomb-making accident blew off his left hand. As early as 1988, Ansari allegedly was executing “petty bombings” for which he used folded train tickets as the timer and detonator for small explosives.
After the demolition of the Babri mosque and riots that followed, the three men outlined a significantly grander plan for which they found help from abroad. Lashkar-e-Taiba was still a small Pakistani militant group and had not yet become the Pakistan military’s most powerful proxy against India. Pan-Islamist and vehemently anti-Hindu, LeT was not content with waging jihad in Kashmir. In parallel to developing its military capacity there, in the early 1990s the group also began building anetwork of operatives to prosecute terrorist attacks across India. After his arrest in August 2013, Abdul Karim allegedly told Indian authorities that he first came into contact with LeT in 1991 and thereafter began helping to build its terrorist infrastructure outside of Kashmir.39 The following year, LeT’s leader, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, dispatched a former teaching colleague to spearhead a recruitment drive inside India in 1992. Azam Cheema arrived shortly before the Babri mosque’s demolition and quickly linked up with TIM leaders, including Ansari, Ghauri, and Karim.
A year to the day after the Babri Masjid’s destruction and with LeT’s assistance, on December 6, 1993, TIM executed its own series of coordinated bombings: forty-three in Mumbai and Hyderabad and seven separate explosions on intercity trains in Hyderabad, Gulbarga, Surat, and Lucknow.41 Most of the explosions were small and only two people were killed. The ability to execute such a high number of coordinated blasts, however, illustrated intensive planning and discipline. Ansari was captured in the midst of planning a second series of bombings scheduled to coincide with India’s Republic Day celebrations in January 1994.
Ghauri hid out in Andhra Pradesh in the wake of the 1993 bombings. After obtaining a fake passport, he fled to Saudi Arabia and then traveled to Pakistan, where he linked up with LeT. With the help of contacts in the Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadis, Karim crossed from Kolkata into Dhaka, Bangladesh. He headed LeT’s operations in Bangladesh during the mid-1990s, part of a wider tasking to help build the group’s pan-India capabilities, for which Karim also played an important role in terms of recruitment and fundraising (especially via the smuggling of counterfeit currency).45 Some of those TIM members who had not fled or been arrested began a recruitment drive, sending some of those they enlisted to Pakistan for training, often via Bangladesh.
Karim acted as a conduit for Indian recruits transiting from or through Bangladesh to LeT camps in Pakistan. Karim also recruited locals and provided explosives training from his Jihadist Violence: The Indian Threat 19 base in Bangladesh.47 Among those he sent to Pakistan for training was Shaikh Abdur Rahman, who founded the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) or Organization of Mujahideen in 1998. Rahman had been a member of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh (HUJI-B), the Bangladeshi branch of the Deobandi organization by the same name in Pakistan. Rahman met Hafiz Saeed and other Lashkar leaders during his stay in Pakistan, where the group trained him on the use of small arms and explosives and on how to build a jihadi organization. Rahman wanted to wage a near enemy jihad against the government in Bangladesh, and after he returned there fell out with Karim over the latter’s insistence on using available jihadi assets in Bangladesh for the struggle against India. Unlike JMB, which focused internally, and LeT, which used Bangladesh solely as a staging point for attacks against India, HuJI-B was active on both fronts.
Working from Bangladesh, including via the Dhaka-based Islamic Chattra Shibir (Islamic Students Organization), Karim coordinated the creation of a robust network throughout north India.50 It formed the backbone of LeT’s Indian operations branch, known as the Dasta Mohammad bin Qasim and commanded by Azam Cheema. Karim became its top field operative, returning to India in 1996 to begin putting his network into action. He engineered a series of bombingin Delhi, Rohtak, and Jalandhar, each executed by a Delhi resident named Amir Hashim. He had moved to Pakistan with his family and quickly fallen in with LeT, beginning in mid-1994 to work in the group’s Karachi office. The 1996 serial bombings Hashim executed were the first significant attacks carried out under Karim’s direct command.53 More attacks followed over the next two years, including serial bombings in Delhi, a spate of blasts elsewhere in northern India, and bombings in Hyderabad and Mumbai.
Collectively, Karim was allegedly involved in more than forty bomb attacks across the country, twenty-one in Delhi alone, committed in 1994 and from 1996 to 1998. Although Karim, LeT’s top field operative and an explosives expert, was Indian, many of those executing the bombs he built between 1996 and 1998 were LeT-trained Pakistani and Bangladeshi militants. For example, in 1998 the Delhi police arrested Abdul Sattar, a resident of Pakistan’s Faislabad district, who had established a cell in Uttar Pradesh. Indian recruits were often used to provide logistical support. In Sattar’s case, Karim leveraged his network to provide the Pakistani operative with false identification papers, local guides, and a landlord who allowed him to build a bunker for housing explosives inside a pottery kiln.
In addition to using Indians for logistical support, Karim trained indigenous recruits on target selection and the preparation of explosives using locally available material such as urea, nitric acid, potassium chloride, nitrobenzene, and sugar.
Following the arrest in Hyderabad of three LeT operatives from Pakistan, Azam Ghauri returned to India in 1998 at Karim’s behest. The three had infiltrated into the city, married, fathered children, and procured identification cards. One of them had established a trucking business in Hyderabad used to transport explosives. Their arrest, and the accompanying seizure of 18 kilograms of research department explosive (RDX) and remote detonation devices, was a setback for Karim and LeT. Ghauri returned to help aid in the recovery, and launched Indian Muslim Mohammad Mujahideen. It executed seven bomb blasts, five in Hyderabad and two in the surrounding areas of Matpalli and Nandad, targeting trains, uses, and markets.60 It was just one of a number of small outfits operating in the area at the time, all of which were part of the same network despite their different names.
Additionally, SIMI was active in the city, as were activists from Indian-administered Kashmir and Pakistan. Independently and collectively, they recruited local youth for training in Pakistan. Ghauri also turned to the criminal underworld for assistance, recruiting some gangsters and partnering with others to assassinate Hindu politicians and businessmen. ARCF: Forerunner of Indian Mujahideen In 1994, two Indian gangsters, Aftab Ansari and Asif Raza Khan, who Jihadist Violence: The Indian Threat 21 belonged to the other major building block of the jihadist movement, were locked up alongside Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh in Tihar Jail.
Sheikh was a British-born Pakistani member of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. Arrested and incarcerated for his role in kidnapping four foreign nationals as part of a plot to free other HuM members imprisoned in India, Sheikh later gained international notoriety when he engineered Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping in Pakistan. In prison, Sheikh motivated Ansari and Asif Khan to wage jihad against India. Aftab Ansari was released from Tihar Jail in 1998. Asif Raza Khan’s incarceration ended the following year in August. The two kept in contact during the interim, meeting during court appearances in New Delhi. In December 1999, Pakistani militants belonging to HuM hijacked Indian Airlines flight 814 en route from Kathmandu to New Delhi. The plane was rerouted to Afghanistan, then governed by the Taliban, where the passengers were released in exchange for three militants incarcerated in India: Sheikh and Maulana Masood Azhar, both Pakistani members of HuM, and Mushtaq Zagar Latramin, a Kashmiri member of the same organization. Maulana Azhar promptly split from HuM to form Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM).
With Sheikh back in Pakistan, Ansari jumped bail and traveled there via Dubai using a fake passport prepared for him by Asif Khan’s contacts in the Bihar Regional Passport Office in Patna. Although Sheikh had followed Maulana Azhar and joined JeM, Ansari also linked up with LeT’s Dasta Mohammad bin Qasim led by Azam Cheema.67 The three of them—Ansari, Cheema, and Sheikh—began plotting to free more militants imprisoned in India and to execute a series of kidnappings as a way of raising money to send recruits for training with LeT and JeM in Pakistan.68 In return for recruiting foot soldiers and facilitating their travel, JeM allowed Ansari to use its assets in India for criminal operations. To execute these plans, Ansari liaised with Asif Khan and his brother, Amir Raza Khan, who he connected with two Pakistani militants operating covertly in India. The men began their own recruiting drive.
SIMI’s rhetoric had hardened in the lead-up to the Babri mosque’s destruction. Playing on fears of Hindu chauvinism, the ongoing campaign of communal violence that accompanied it and the failure of the Indian political leadership to confront this movement or to protect Muslims during episodes of communal violence, the organization sought to position itself as a defender of the Muslim community. The concept of self-defense was crucial, as was SIMI’s provision to its members of “a sense of power and agency which they were denied in their actual lives.” Influenced by Maududi’s vision and motivated by the perceived failure of the Indian secular state to protect its Muslim minority, SIMI declared that its objectives were to end India’s secular state, its caste system and the polytheism of Hinduism, and to create a Muslim caliphate that would rule by Sharia.
Its slogan became “Allah is our Lord, Mohammed is our commander, Quran is our constitution, Jihad is our path, and Shahadat [martyrdom] is our desire.”As the 1990s progressed, SIMI leaders increasingly sought to link themselves—ideologically, rhetorically, and operationally -- with the burgeoning transnational jihadist movement. In addition to providing the mood music to which Indian jihadists began to dance, the organization connected with Pakistani and Kashmiri militant groups that could provide military training. The aim was to prepare for jihad, but SIMI did not initiate or execute its own terrorist attacks. Rather it became a feeder for the burgeoning Indian jihadist movement and a recruiting pool for Pakistan-based organizations like LeT looking to train would- be homegrown terrorists.76 SIMI was independent and no group had a monopoly on its members. The organization worked closely with burgeoning networks belonging to Pakistan- based groups, however. For example, according to one former head of the Intelligence Bureau, beginning in the mid-1990s, some SIMI leaders recruited individuals who were then vetted by LeT-linked mosques in India before being sent to Pakistan for training.
On their return, some trainees maintained relationships with the Pakistani groups that trained them. Others became independent operators or coagulated into small, indigenous cells that acted unilaterally. Several of their number went on to lead the Indian Mujahideen. Riyaz Shahbandri (aka Riyaz Bhatkal) led the IM at the time of writing. Riyaz grew up in the southwest Indian port town of Bhatkal, from where he takes his alias. According to a former superintendent of police in Bhatkal in the late 1990s who claims to have interrogated Riyaz during his tenure, he was involved in occasional criminality and already evinced radical leanings.78 Based on Riyaz’s police dossier and interviews with his relatives and friends of the family, Praveen Swami asserts that his brother-in-law’s SIMI activism motivated Riyaz to be become involved with the organization. Riyaz studied at the Saboo Siddiqui Engineering College in Mumbai and began spending time at SIMI offices in the city around 2001, when the organization was becoming increasingly extreme before the government ban.
Riyaz’s brother Iqbal, a follower of the Tablighi Jama’at, an Islamic proselytizing order, was another important influence on his drift toward radicalism. At present, Iqbal also holds a leadership role in the Indian Mujahideen network. Mohammad Sadique Israr Sheikh (Sadique Sheikh) was born in Azamgarh, in Uttar Pradesh, before his parents migrated to Mumbai in search of a better life. When they, along with thousands of others, were evicted from their homes to make way for the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), the family moved to the Cheeta Camp housing project. A planned slum in northeastern Mumbai, it was built explicitly for those families displaced by the BARC. Sadique Sheikh joined SIMI in 1996. Soon he, the Shahbandri brothers, and other SIMI members were engaging in heated discussions about Islam, communal violence, and the Babri mosque’s destruction.
Abdul Subhan Qureshi was among the SIMI activists present for these meetings. From Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, Qureshi moved to Mumbai for high school, later earned a degree in industrial electronics, and subsequently specialized in software maintenance at the CMS Institute. A committed SIMI activist by 1998, he allegedly was one of the main organizers of its last public conference in 2001, where SIMI leaders advocated once again for jihad. The men became acquainted not only with one another, but also with other Indian militants activating at the time. Despite these burgeoning connections, it was a relative of Sadique Sheikh’s sister-in-law’s relative, Mujahid Salim Islahi, who facilitated his path toward violence, providing the young SIMI member with Asif Khan’s e-mail address. Soon after, the two met at Cheeta Camp.
Through Asif Khan, Sadique Sheikh connected with Aftab Ansari. In April 2000, the two met in Kolkata and not long after Sadique Sheikh crossed the border into Bangladesh, where he remained in a safe house for several months. From there, he and several other would-be militants traveled to Pakistan, all of them carrying Pakistani passports. After training in LeT camps, Sadique Sheikh returned in July 2001 via Nepal to India, where he reconnected with Asif Khan and a Pakistani militant known as Zahid to begin plotting terrorist attacks.83 Notably, Riyaz was seeking funding from Asif Khan to finance terrorist operations in India by this time as well. Azam Ghauri was killed during a shootout with the Gujarat police in 2000. Abdul Karim absconded to Pakistan via Bangladesh the same year. Despite being one of the founders of LeT’s pan-India operations, he was a spent force in terms of his ability to operate inside India.85 Instead, he became a mentor to a new generation of Indian recruits, some of who worked under his direct command, and key node in moving counterfeit currency into India to support terrorist operations.
The Delhi police arrested Asif Khan in late October 2001. His interrogation led to the arrest of additional Pakistan- trained militants from HuJI and LeT, and to the recovery of an arms cache. Asif Khan was wanted for multiple crimes in several states. After the West Bengal authorities briefly took him into custody he was remanded to the Gujarat police, who killed him in December, allegedly while he trying to escape. Despite their exit from the battlefield, these men had helped build a movement poised for growth.
Source: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/jihadist-violence-the-indian-threat
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/jihadist-violence-indian-threat-2/d/35193