Ahmedabad Serial Blasts Kingpin Mufti Abul Bashir in Police Net
 
DHNS

Ahmedabad/Lucknow,Aug 17: Gujarat police on Saturday claimed to have busted the pan-India network that was behind the recent Ahmedabad serial blasts with the arrest of 10 people including Mufti Abul Bashir Islahi, described as the mastermind behind the explosions in the Gujarati city. 
 
“We have almost solved the case. We have arrested 10 people who were involved in the July 26 blasts including the mastermind, Mufti Abul Bashir Islahi,” Gujarat Director General of Police P C Pande said.

He said most of the arrested persons were part of the banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and Bashir, picked up in a joint operation by the Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat police from his modest house in Saraimeer town of eastern UP’s Azamgarh district on the night of August 14, had plotted the entire blasts.

UP police sources said that Bashir’s involvement in the “UP, Hyderabad Bangalore and Malegaon blasts could not be ruled out”. “Bashir shifted to Hyderabad in March 2007 and blasts occurred in the AP capital in May 2007,” they pointed out.
 
According to the sources, Bashir arrived in his native village of Binapar in Saraimeer barely 20 days back from Hyderabad where he taught in a seminary.

Some incriminating documents had been recovered from Bashir Islahi’s possession and the call details of his cellphone were being examined.

Ahmedabad blasts brains: SIMI man, techie
Times of India
 
AHMEDABAD/LUCKNOW: Three weeks after serial blasts rocked Ahmedabad, killing 57 people, Gujarat police claimed a major breakthrough with the arrest of 10 activists of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), including nine from Gujarat.

The formal announcement of these arrests was made only after the alleged mastermind, Mufti Abdul Bashar Kasmi, was picked up from Sarai Meer locality in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh on Saturday. A Gujarat police team struggled to convince their reluctant UP counterparts about Bashar's involvement and it took some phone calls between higher-ups in the two states to sort things out.

Bashar was arrested in a joint operation and produced before the special CBI judge (Lucknow) Rekha Dixit who allowed 3 day transit-remand to Gujarat police.

Police officials in Ahmedabad claimed that the group headed by SIMI leader Safdar Nagori had executed similar blasts in Jaipur, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

After Nagori's arrest in Indore in March '08, Mufti Bashar had wrested control of SIMI's terror module.

The breakthrough is bound to boost the sagging morale of Indian agencies in the forefront of the war on terror. It's the first time that police have moved with this kind of speed and thoroughness after a terror attack.

It also marks a new level of coordination between state police forces and with central intelligence agencies, a factor cited as a negative after each terror attack.

"We say this with pleasure and pride that our investigations would lead to the cracking of other serial blasts in the country," said Gujarat DGP, P C Pande, acknowledging the contribution of police forces from Delhi, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Maharashtra in the investigations, apart from central agencies.

Bashar re-grouped the SIMI network after Nagori's arrest and plotted the Ahmedabad blasts with the help of a Mumbai-based techie, an employee of Wipro who is still at large.

"SIMI operatives were working under the guise of Indian Mujahideen. Remove the first and last letters of SIMI, and you have the IM," said Pande.

'Raw material for bombs came from MP'

Announcing the arrest of Mufti Abdul Bashar Kasmi, Gujarat DGP, P C Pande said: "Mufti had paid frequent visits to Gujarat and the Ahmedabad and Surat terror strikes were planned during a camp held in January 2008 in the forests of Pavagadh, 50 km from Vadodara.

Bashar planned the attacks in the house of Yunus Mansuri in Bapunagar area of Ahmedabad," said joint commissioner of police (crime) Ashish Bhatia, who led the investigations.

"Raw material for making the bombs arrived from Madhya Pradesh and a house in Vatva area of Ahmedabad was rented by the group to make the bombs. While some bombs were made at Yunus' residence, the rest were manufactured in Vadodara and sent to Surat," said Bhatia.

Crime branch officials said the two cars that were turned into deadly bombs in the Civil Hospital and L G Hospital blasts in Ahmedabad were stolen from Mumbai by SIMI activists from MP.

The cars were handed over to the terror group in Vapi town of Gujarat and the car-lifters stayed in Bharuch with key SIMI operative, Sajid Mansuri, whose arrest earlier this week unravelled the whole plot. The cars were later brought to Ahmedabad and fitted with the bombs.

Police have also identified the people and places from where second-hand bicycles were procured for use in the blasts.

Indian Mujahideen is just hardline version of SIMI
Times of India

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.