Friday, December 05, 2008

Assam Blasts - Ominous Bloody Thursday

Harekrishna Deka
ex-DGP, Assam & Sr Journalist

India has increasingly become the target of terrorist bombings in the recent past, with blasts in Jaipur, Gujarat, Bengaluru and Delhi taking the lives of scores of people. Had the explosives not been recovered in Surat in time, and had the conspiracies in Mumbai and Chennai not been detected, the catastrophe would have only been greater. That organisations such as Indian Mujahideen that could in reality be a form of SIMI, and that there is a form of jihad that a section of communal extremists now subscribes to as a means of revenge is becoming more apparent by the day.

So, is there a foreign hand that now extends from a neighbouring country, in so far as the blasts in Assam on October 30, 2008 are concerned? One must mention in this context that the needle of suspicion in India’s blasts over the past months has often pointed to Harkat ul Jihadi Islami (HUJI), an organisation that has its roots in neighbouring Bangladesh. The blasts in Assam have meanwhile been claimed by an outfit called the Islamic Security Force of India (ISFI-Indian Mujahideen). The IM suffix, one gathers, could link the outfit to both HUJI and SIMI.

Significantly, the ISFI is not an organisation that has appeared suddenly out of nowhere. It was way back in the year 2000 that the Special Branch (SB) of Assam Police had gathered evidence regarding the existence of such a group. There is enough such evidence to establish that the ISFI at that point in time attempted to organise the Muslim community against Bodo ultra groups such as National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) and the Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT), which operated in the lower Assam districts. It was then that the name of Muhammad Mushtaqil, the secretary of ISFI, first surfaced as a terror element who had the support of the al-Qaida and was associated with the al-Omar, an outfit that operates in Pak Occupied Kashmir (POK). One could analyse that the ISFI, which then kept itself beyond the radar of the country’s intelligence agencies used its time to broaden its base of operations. While there were then no established links of the ISFI with HUJI, one shouldn’t overlook the fact that Bangladesh’s HUJI is a creation of the al-Qaeda and that the HUJI called itself the “Bangladeshi Taliban”. One, hence, could believe that the ISFI comprises a sleeper cell of the al-Qaeda.....Continue

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