Author: Abhay Vaidya & Syed Rizwanullah
Publication: The Times of India
Date: July 14, 2006
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1754359.cms
It's not the usual face of Kashmiri terror.
When security officials investigated a recent encounter, they discovered the
gun-wielding jihadi was a 19-year-old boy from Kolhapur who had become a Hizb-ul
Mujahideen operative after passing through several madrassas near Kohlapur
and in Gujarat.
Hafiz Irfan Attar, who surfaced only in his
death in a skirmish with the Army in Kashmir, barely a fortnight after the
June 1 attack on the RSS headquarters in Nagpur isn't the only instance of
a new trend.
Clear indicators are now available that terrorism
has quietly struck roots in Maharashtra, unnoticed by intelligence agencies
and state police.
In the last few months, Maharashtra has been
gripped by terrorism-related episodes, especially in smaller towns such as
Aurangabad, Beed, Malegaon, Nagpur, and Kolhapur.
Unlike in the past when terrorist strikes
were ascribed to Kashmiri militants or the underworld (as in 1993), disturbing
trends have emerged prompting the Maharashtra police to announce new units
of the Anti-Terrorism Squads at Aurangbad, Pune and Nagpur.
Security agencies are now publicly acknowledging
the presence of "sleeper cells" in Maharashtra, comprising young
men drawn from the local population.
Rather shockingly, the Kashmir-Kolhapur link
surfaced only when a Lashkar-e-Taiba spokesman issued a statement giving precise
details of the building and flat number of Attar's family in Kolhapur.
The family of the slain youth told the police
and journalists that Attar was entirely educated in a madrassa in Nippani
before moving to a madrassa in Gujarat where he is believed to have lived
for two years before being recruited by the LeT/ Hizbul.
As if to mock at the entire Indian security
apparatus, the LeT spokesman declared that - like Attar, at least a dozen
Muslim youths from Maharashtra were active in their terror network. (Intelligence
agencies said the number of youths from Maharashtra under terrorism-training
is as high as 200).
Muslim community members in Aurangabad said
a new, ultra-fanatic group called the "Ahle Hadis" that sees itself
as part of Osama Bin Laden's "Salfi" group and scorns at the larger
Indian Muslim community for not being orthodox enough in following Islamic
tenets has emerged in the region.
According to a prominent community member,
most of the 11 persons arrested in the Aurangabad RDX case in May belonged
to "Ahle Hadis". The prime suspects were also said to belong to
this group.
In Kolhapur, some community leaders such as
Husain Jamadar, general secretary of the progressive Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal,
admitted that madrassa students were "soft and easy targets".
He said: "Madrassa education is purely
based on grasping the Holy Koran and they don't even bother to teach the meaning
of it.
The students grow up only in a religious environment,
are restricted to masjids and do not have any communication with people from
other religions. They are often alienated from mainstream society."
With inputs from Mohsin Mulla, Kolhapur
