Author: Johnson T A and Rajeev P I
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: February 23, 2008
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/276151.html
In a catch possibly reaching the nerve centre
of the activities of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India, the Corps
of Detectives of the Karnataka police have arrested a former software engineer
and discovered that he may be a key link to SIMI activities in India and to
leaders of the group.
Mohammed Yahya Kammukutty, 31, hailing from
Mukkom in Kozhikode district of Kerala, was arrested Thursday night as part
of a continuing probe into a SIMI network in Karnataka that has already lead
to the arrest of six youths from northern Karnataka, including four medical
students.
Yahya is believed to have participated in
one key meeting of at least 32 alleged SIMI cadre, including the six arrested
so far, held in the Castle Rock forest region on the Karnataka-Goa border,
last year. He is being shown as arrested, along with the others, in a case
of conspiracy to wage war against the country registered with the Hubli police.
Police sources said Yahya who frequently travelled
to Saudi Arabia was as a key supplier of funds for activities undertaken by
the constituents of the proscribed outfit working under the guise of a new
unit called SARANI.
Yahya is found to have come up on police and
intelligence radars on at least one occasion in the past - including a police
interrogation in early 2003 when he-then a 25-year-old-was found to have taken
an alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba militant Muhammad Faisal Khan alias Abu Sultan
on a tour of Kerala and also arranged his stay in Bangalore.
Sultan, considered the then southern India
commander of the LeT, is suspected to have played a role in the March 13,
2003, bomb blasts in Mumbai's Mulund area that killed 12 people and a series
of blasts in the city in 2002-2003. He was killed in an encounter in Goregaon
with the Andheri Crime Intelligence Unit of the Mumbai police on March 29,
2003.
"When Yahya was questioned in Kerala
and Mumbai in 2003 he had stated he was working as an IT professional in Bangalore
and did not know anything about the LeT links of Abu Sultan. He said he was
merely a tourist guide to Sultan," sources said.
The sources said Yahya, who was asked to leave
the software company of a major multi-national firm two months ago, is suspected
to be a close associate of a much wanted and key former SIMI President from
Kerala C A M Basheer-considered in security circles as one of the first Indians
to receive terrorist training in Pakistan, in the north western frontier province,
in the late 1980s.
Basheer, hailing from Aluva in Kerala, is
also suspected to have played a role in the March 13, 2003 bomb blasts in
Mulund. He is currently believed to be hiding in Saudi Arabia, senior security
officials in Karnataka said.
"Yahya made frequent trips to Saudi Arabia.
He had just returned a month prior to his arrest from Haj. He could have been
meeting Basheer on the visits," police sources said.
The electrical engineer is also considered
a key associate of another engineer Adnan alias Hafeez from Bijapur in Karnataka,
currently being sought by the police as the lynchpin behind the efforts to
build a SIMI network in Karnataka. "Mohammed Yahya, who was employed
by a major Indian IT company before joining the multi-national unit, seems
to be the same person who was questioned by the Kerala and Mumbai police for
his links to Abu Sultan," a senior investigator said.
Yahya had been living in a rented house in
south Bangalore for the past year. He was asked to step down from his last
employment two months ago after his company found him stealing data and using
it for a company he had created on his own. He had also been found to be actively
involved in sending e-mails containing jihadi literature to colleagues, an
investigator said.
The Karnataka police suspect that a network
of the banned SIMI was being built in Karnataka in an effort to provide support
to foreign-trained terrorists to carry out operations in the region.
Whle the Bangalore cops who have arrested
him paint Yahya as a terror suspect, his family in Mukkom village of Kozhikode
insists the charge is preposterous. His father says it's unthinkable that
his son could gravitate towards any kind of militant crowd.
Until he passed out of the National Institute of Technology in Kozhikode in
1996 with a degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering, and got employed
at Tata Infotech in Bangalore through campus recruitment, Yahya was Nellikkaparambil
Kammukkutty. He had later officially renamed himself as Yahya Kammukkutty.
Though the Bangalore cops had claimed him
to have been arrested only yesterday, his family has a different story. His
father N N Beerankutty says Yahya had stayed for a fortnight at his family
home in Kozhikode until February 17, to look up the work on a small house
he was building there. He left for Bangalore on February 18, and the next
day, four men, claiming to be from the Intelligence Bureau, turned up at his
Bangalore home, while he was having lunch. They said they wanted to sort out
some papers, and took him away in front of his wife and three kids, according
to Beerankutty.
Beerankutty reached Bangalore the next day
with some friends to look for his son. Since the police there could not say
where he was, Beerankutty returned to Kozhikode today morning. Beerankutty
claims to have been thinking of moving a habeas corpus petition to trace him,
when he finally got to know of Yahya's arrest this morning.
Coming from a middle-class, deeply religious
Muslim family in the village, his neighbours say they have no clue of his
activities after he moved to Bangalore 12 years ago. "He is a devout
Muslim given to praying five times a day, like all of us in our family. He
had always been an introvert, shy, studious and softspoken, and had never
got into any kind of trouble. No one will believe he has anything to do with
militancy," insists Beerankutty.
Police sources, however, say they are verifying
some indications that Yahya, who used to come down from Bangalore once every
few months, was in close touch with elements of the banned SIMI who had since
gone into other innocuous front outfits.
Kozhikode was a major SIMI base until the
ban. That apart, sources say Yahya has been under surveillance and investigation
in Bangalore for over a couple of years now, his mobile phone number was found
in the pocket of one of the two militants killed in J&K two years ago.
