Author: Nitin Yeshwantrao
Publication: The Times of India
Date: July 15, 2014

Law-enforcing agencies and the intelligence department have once again been caught napping in Thane as little or no information is available on how the four educated youths now reportedly in Iraq were brainwashed into joining the jihadis there and who indoctrinated them.

While sleuths from Thane police, Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) swung into action after families of the four youths reported their disappearance at the Bazarpeth police station in Kalyan between May 24 and 27, the various agencies risk facing flak for their failure to keep track of what was going on in the district.

Their failure may be seen as especially stark as Thane and its adjoining townships have been on the radar of sleuths for a while now, given the history of indoctrination of youths by extremist elements here.

The former president of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), Saquib Nachin, is known to operate from his native town Padgha in Bhiwandi taluka and is said to have brainwashed many local youths.

A senior official told TOI: “After the Babri demolition, it was easy to poison youth and, after feeding them with false information, to ask them to take up arms to protect their faith.

There were then quite a few incidents where parents reported their young sons missing. Subsequently , information trickled in that they had crossed the border for arms training.“

The potential centres where religious sentiments could be fanned were then put under the scanner, with sleuths monitoring religious institutes and their sources of funding and keeping a watch on any outside elements entering local areas.

In the case of the four youths who have now gone missing—Aarif Majid alias Guddu, Aman Tandel, Saleem Tanki and Fahad Shaikh— there seems to have been little information on the ground, officials said.

A police officer pointed out: “The four youths did not turn jihadis overnight.

It must have taken months of indoctrination by someone to make them go to a foreign land. All the youths had embraced the Ahle Hadees sect of Islam in recent times and had taken to extreme practices. A sound ground intelligence network would have tipped off the authorities about the happenings here, but it seems there is either no information or no coordination between agencies monitoring such activities.”