Indian Mujahideen founder Yasin Bhatkal arrested in Nepal: Reports

[drkrn]

every here and there every one are praising IB for their success,but no comments are there about intelligence help from NEPAL/FBI/UAE.without their help how can we trace and bring this person back to india?

 

[nrupatunga]

I seen K.C Singh former diplomat tweeting that Yasin Bhatkal arrested like Tunda. Clearly a GCC state is deporting them via Nepal to evade Pak pressure or militant backlash. Welcome step!

FBI doesn't sell its tabs on people for cheap. I wonder what IB paid for them.

Even i had pointed the same thing in post #15. All of nowhere suddenly government agencies start getting "big fish's" like tunda, yasin etc, there may be some behind the scenes dealing?? what is govt/cong giving in return??

 

[sayareakd]

Just made him sit and then tie road around the steel chair with heater under it, turn on the heater and will sing in few minutes without any effort.

 

[sayareakd]

Congrats to all who have make this happen they deserve paid holiday,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

 

[kseeker]

Hope every patriot Indian is happy now since Yasin Bhatkal has been arrested. Agencies have done their job, kudos to them.

Did anyone think, what will happen next ?

Here it is...

He will be handed over to civil police for questioning.

Police will submit their charge sheet, bull shit etc etc...

Court will fix the hearing date...

Court hearing date will be postponed for at least couple months since one or the other person/s involved in the case wouldn't be available.

Somehow, court gives it's interim judgement and YB is sent to jail again till we hear final final judgement.

In between, YB henchmen try for bail and human rights NGOs will fight for his release.

Mean while couple of more years would pass through and YB would be given royal treatment in Indian jail and he would be served with Hyderabadi Biryaani. Who is paying Money for his Biryaani ? Well, guess who, it's WE THE PEOPLE Hail Indian Democracy !!!

At the end of 2016, court will sentence him to death.

Again , YB henchmen or he will file mercy petition, president of India will take time to consider his mercy plea and finally he says NO.

During this whole drama, YB is silently suffering from dengue or malaria or typhoid and dies a natural death.

Govt on one fine day announces that, he has been hanged till death and his body is buried in the jail premises.

Everyone happy again and lives happily ever after

 

[bennedose]

Bhatkal is a good catch. The guy was smart and slippery.

Saw him on TV - he had a hood over his face and he waved to the camera. That means the arrest has not hit him yet and he is cheerful. They will break him down. Sloo-oowly.

 

[sayareakd]

in Bihar News crews tried to talk to him and he raised his finger on camera.

He must be saying i soon, will join Kasab, for all that i have done.

 

[tramp]

in Bihar News crews tried to talk to him and he raised his finger on camera.

He must be saying i soon, will join Kasab, for all that i have done.

Let us give him a speedy send off to his jannatul firdous. Launch him right away.

 

[Yusuf]

Great job by the agencies but I had this to say

https://twitter.com/yusufdfi/status/372977948900343808

https://twitter.com/yusufdfi/status/372977955930009601

https://twitter.com/yusufdfi/status/372977963152576512


https://twitter.com/yusufdfi/status/372977969876041729

 

[The Messiah]

only two pages on a defense forum ?

 

[tarunraju]

Subramanian Swamy in an interview with Barkha Dutt said that FBI has no role to play in this capture, but Saudi Arabia. He suspects that Bhatkal was caught in KSA, moved to Nepal, and a dog-and-pony show about him being captured there was put up.

 

[Singh]

Yasin Bhatkal's arrest isn't the end of the Indian Mujahideen
​

Four weeks after a Hellfire missile blew his body apart near Pakistan's Miranshah on 21 May, 2010, the al Qaeda's third-in-command spoke to his followers from the grave, through a posthumous online audio message. "I bring you the good tidings," Sai'd al-Masri declared, "that last February's India operation was against a Jewish locale in the west of the Indian capital [sic, throughout], in the area of the German bakeries — a fact that the enemy tried to hide — and close to 20 Jews were killed in the operation, a majority of them from their so-called statelet, Israel".

Indian Mujahideen founder Yasin Bhatkal. AFP

"The person who carried out this operation was a heroic soldier from the 'Soldiers of the Sacrifice Brigade', which is one of the brigades of Qaedat al-Jihad [the al Qaeda's correct name] in Kashmir, under the command of Commander Illyas Kashmiri, may Allah preserve him."

Last night, an Intelligence Bureau-led operation ended with the arrest of fugitive Indian Mujahideen commander Yasin Muhammad Ahmad Zarar Siddibapa, also known as Yasin Bhatkal, along with one of the men who is alleged to have helped him bomb Hyderabad's Dilsukhnagar, Asadullah Akhtar 'Haddi'. Intelligence Bureau agents, sources have told Firstpost, painstakingly tracked Yasin Bhatkal as he skipped across the India-Nepal border after successive bombings—finally telling police in Motihari just where to find him.

This is a breakthrough for India's beleaguered counter-terrorism effort—but also a grim reminder that the jihadist threat is metamorphosing. From the interrogations of men like 26/11 perpetrator David Headley, it's long been known India's jihadists are reaching out for support to the wider global movement.

In 2008, Indian investigators dismantled much of the infrastructure of the Indian Mujahideen—a loose network drawn from the jihadist fringes of the proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India, financed by Indian organised crime networks and trained by the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The Indian Mujahideen had carried out an urban bombing campaign that claimed hundreds of lives after 2005; more than 70 of its operatives were eventually arrested in the 2005 sweep.

There was a long list of men, though, who evaded police, and are still at large—among them Azamgarh's Mirza Shadab Beg, Shahnawaz Alam, and Muhammad 'Bada' Sajid, Gujarat's Alamzeb Afridi, Mahrashtra's Zulfikar Fayyaz 'Kagazi' and Rahil Sheikh, and Asadullah Akhtar's own alleged co-conspirator in the Hyderabad bombings, Uttar Pradesh resident Ariz Khan.

Key leaders, more important, also escaped the police: operational commander Riyaz Shahbandri, his brother and top ideologue Iqbal Shahbandri, and the man who liaised between the network's various cells, Abdul Subhan Qureshi. The ganglord who financed them all, Bihar's Amir Raza Khan, is also still at large.

Each of these men could be—and perhaps already is—the next Yasin Bhatkal.

The question interrogators will be focusing on isn't just his role in past bombings and the recruits he raised in places from Darbhanga to Hyderabad, but who financed the operations and guided them. Yasin Bhatkal isn't believed to have personally travelled to Pakistan to meet with the Indian Mujahideen's commanders, but his Skype and e-mail conversations will be of huge interest.

The biggest question will be this: just what is the Indian Mujahideen leadership in Pakistan planning next?

Headley called them the "Karachi Projects": two distinct Indian Mujahideens, as it were, in competition. The Lashkar itself ran one, he said, using cadre recruited from the ranks of Islamist groups in India. The second, NIA documents reveal him to have said, was run by a retired Pakistani military officer called Abdur Rehman Hashim, also known by the code name "Pasha." This second group of Indian jihadists, Headley told the NIA, was a "personal set-up of Pasha, and it is independent of the LET".

In the wake of 26/11, though, Pakistan came under intense pressure to scale back it's intelligence services' war-by-proxy against India—and the fugitive leadership turned to new friends.

Major Hashim, according to Headley's account, had served with the 6 Baloch Regiment until 2002, when he refused to lead his troops into combat against Taliban fleeing from the Tora Bora complex in Afghanistan — the last stronghold of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in that country. For his actions, Major Hashim was demoted to captain, resigned from service, and joined the Lashkar as an instructor—training, among others, the men who attacked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's rally in Srinagar in 2004.

Hashim, though, later fell out with the Lashkar, incensed, like many jihadists, by its refusal to take on the Pakistani state and western forces in Afghanistan. Following the 2007 siege of jihadists hold up inside Islamabad's Lal Masjid in 2007, Headley was to recall, Major Hashim even contemplated assassinating Pakistan's former President, General Pervez Musharraf.

The Lal Masjid events, Headley recalled, sparked off an ideological war, leading to "splits in many of the outfits." The Lashkar's top military commander, Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, even faced a "serious problem in holding [on to] the LeT [cadre] and convincing them to fight for Kashmir and against India."

In spite of energetic efforts by Lakhvi and the ISI, Headley said, the "aggression and commitment shown to jihad by the several splinter groups influenced many committed fighters to leave Kashmir-centric outfits and join the Taliban." "I understand this compelled the LeT to consider a spectacular strike in India," Headley surmised. Headley himself turned to Muhammad Illyas Kashmiri, a former jihad volunteer with the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen who fought in Kashmir before forming the al-Qaeda affiliated Brigade 313, to fund his plans to execute a bombing in Copenhagen.

Major Hashim was eventually arrested by Pakistani investigators in October, 2009 — but was never brought to trial.

For years now, there's been a steady string of al-Qaeda references to India. In April 2006, bin-Laden Osama himself spoke of a "Crusader-Zionist-Hindu war against the Muslims." His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, warned Pakistanis in September 2003 that General Pervez Musharraf was plotting to "hand you over to the Hindus and flee to enjoy his secret accounts." In the wake of 26/11, al-Masri himself released a statement warning India of attacks if it struck against Pakistan.

Maulana Aasim Umar, an al-Qaeda idelogue in Pakistan, earlier this year, released an appeal to Indian Muslims, asking why "there is no storm in your ocean".

"Is there not even a single mother in Uttar Pradesh", Umar wrote, "who may sing those lullabies to children after listening to which they grow up to stage the battleground of Shamili instead of heading to bazaars, parks and playing fields? Have the successors of Shaykhul Hind discarded emigration and Jihad forever? Has the land of Bihar become so barren that it is unable to prepare even a single group of the like of the Mujahideen of Azeemabad?"

"O' those who have ruled India for eight hundred years", he concluded, "O' those who lit the flame of tawheed in the darkness of polytheism—how can you remain in your slumber when the Muslims of the world are awakening"?

That's just what the Indian Mujahideen hoped to do: to rekindle a long jihadist tradition. The Indian Mujahideen's e-mail manifesto released after the Delhi bombings invoked precisely this political heritage: "we have carried out this attack in the memory of two most eminent Mujahids of India: Sayyed Ahmed Shaheed and Shah Ismail Shaheed, who had raised the glorious banner of Jihad against the disbelievers in this very city of Delhi.

Ever since the fifteenth century and earlier, jihadists have emerged at various points of political crisis, seeing in Islam not just a faith but a language of political praxis. Like those past wars, the birth and rise of the Indian Mujahideen points to deep dysfunctions in our polity—dysfunctions which generated forces which are very far from spent.

Yasin Bhatkal's arrest doesn't mean the story of India's jihadist movement is anywhere near its end.

Yasin Bhatkal's arrest isn't the end of the Indian Mujahideen - Firstpost

 

[Singh]

All you need to know about arrested Indian Mujahideen founder Yasin Bhatkal
​

Editor's Note: This piece by Praveen Swami was first published in July, on the anniversary of the German Bakery blasts. Yasin Bhatkal has reportedly been arrested from the Indo-Nepal early today morning. We are republishing the piece to give our readers a sense of who the IM founder is.

He was there, police believe, less than an hour before they raided the Indian Mujahideen safehouse in the Bhadra forests outside Chikmagalur in October, 2008. He's been recorded, on closed-circuit television, walking into the German Bakery in Pune, carrying a bomb-laden backpack, and again on the streets Hyderabad's Dilsukhnagar, minutes before an explosion extinguished the life of seventeen. He was in jail, they think, in November 2009, a slight young man with a wispy beard, who called himself Muhammad Ashraf, and walked out on bail.

The story of fugitive Indian Mujahideen operative Muhammad Ahmad Zarar Siddibapa, also known as Yasin Bhatkal — needs telling as as Indians mark yet another anniversary of the 7/11 bombings. It tell us about the birth and rise of the modern jihadist movement in India—and why it isn't about to die.

Little evidence exists — twitter claims notwithstanding — that the Indian Mujahideen was behind this week's bombing in Bodh Gaya. The Indian Mujahideen has, however, been by far the most lethal urban terrorist group since 7/11, though an attack it may have had more to do with than is widely known. Firstpost will report more on it today. Had stories of young men like Siddibapa been paid more attention to a decade ago, by police and by politicians, things might have turned out differently.

A man shows a police hand-out with pictures of Yasin Bhatkal, the alleged commander of Indian Mujahideen. AFP.
A man shows a police hand-out with pictures of Yasin Bhatkal, the alleged commander of Indian Mujahideen. AFP.

Educated at Bhatkal's élite AnjumanHami-e-Muslimeen school, the 1983-born Siddibapa left for Pune as a teenager. He was later introduced to other members of the Indian Mujahideen as a trained engineer, but police in Pune have found no documentation suggesting he ever studied in the city. Instead, investigators say, he spent much of his time with a hometown childhood friend, Unani medicine practitioner-turned-Islamist proselytiser Iqbal Ismail Shahbandri.

Like his brother Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri, now believed to be hiding out in Karachi, Ismail Shahbandri had become an ideological mentor to many young Islamists. His recruits were, in the main, educated young men — but men also angry with a society they believed was hostile to their religion.

For many of these men, an organisation called the Students Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, provided a home. SIMI had begun as an establishmentarian political Islamist organisation, the scholar Yoginder Sikand has recorded, the communally-troubled decade from 1991 to 2001 saw it lurching further and further to the right. "Following the destruction of the Babri mosque and the subsequent massacre of Muslims in large parts of India, the SIMI concluded that there was no hope for Muslims in seeking to dialogue with Hindus or the government."

In 1996, SIMI declared that democracy and secularism were false gods: Muslims had no option but to struggle for the establishment of a caliphate. At a conference held in Mumbai in September, 2001, it called on the 25,000 students to "turn to Allah, to engage in missionary work (da'wat) and to launch jihad".

Even this wasn't enough, though, for some young men like Riyaz Shahbandri: SIMI seemed to be all talk, and the radicals wanted more. In the months leading up to the communal violence that was to tear Gujarat apart in 2002, Shahbandri met with his Indian Mujahideen co-founders Abdul Subhan Qureshi and Sadiq Israr Sheikh. Later, he made contact with ganglord-turned-jihadist Amir Raza Khan — the man who would fund the training of this core group at Lashkar camps in Pakistan. Following the 2002 carnage, there were plenty more volunteers.

Early in the summer of 2004, investigators say, the core members of the Indian Mujahideen — though it wasn't using the name then, and would only later deploy it to distinguish its members from Pakistani jihadist groups like the Lashkar — met at Bhatkal's beachfront home to discuss their plans.

Iqbal Shahbandri and Bhatkal-based cleric Shabbir Gangoli are alleged to have held ideological classes; the group also took time out to practice shooting with airguns. Siddibapa had overall charge of arrangements—a task that illustrated his status as the Bhatkal brothers' most trusted lieutenant.

Bhatkal, police investigators say, became the centre of the Indian Mujahideen's operations. From their safehouses in Vitthalamakki and Hakkalamane, bombs were despatched to operational cells dispersed across the country, feeding the most sustained jihadist offensive India has ever seen.

It's hard to say precisely why Siddibapa took the course he did: human motivation is far too complex to allow for any one-dimensional explanation. Siddibapa's family — who might have some insight — deny he is a terrorist. In 2010, they also said Siddibapa had left home after a fight, and his whereabouts were unknown. It's interesting to note, though, that his brother Abdul Samad went down a very different route. In May, 2010, Samad was rendered to India by the United Arab Emirates—amidst unfounded allegations he was an Indian Mujahideen operatives. Intelligence Bureau interrogators concluded Samad had no contact with Indian Mujahideen.

Samad's story is much more typical of Bhatkal than that of his brother. The Nawayath Muslims of Bhatkal, made prosperous by hundreds of years of trade across the Indian Ocean, emerged as the region's dominant land-owning community. Early in the twentieth century, inspired by call of Aligarh reformer Syed Ahmed Khan, Bhatkal notables led a campaign to bring modern education.

Education helped the Navayath Muslims prosper in the 1970s, as new opportunities opened up in the Persian gulf and in India. Ismail Shahbandri, Riyaz's father, set up leather-tanning factory in Mumbai's Kurla area in the mid-1970s. He went on to obtain a civil engineering degree from Mumbai's Saboo Siddiqui Engineering College. His wife, Nashua Ismail, is the daughter of an electronics store owner in Bhatkal's Dubai Market.

This wealth, though, also engendered resentments. In the years after the Emergency, the Jana Sangh and its affiliates began to capitalise on resentments Bhatkal's Hindus felt about the prosperity and political power of the Navayaths. The campaign paid off in 1983, when the Hindu right-wing succeeded in dethroning legislator SM Yahya, who had served as a state minister between 1972 and 1982. Both communities entered into ostentatious display of piety and power.

Early in 1993, Bhatkal was hit by communal riots which claimed seventeen lives and left dozens injured. Later, in April 1996, Bharatiya Janata Party legislator U. Chittarajan was assassinated — and two Muslims were murdered in retaliation. More violence broke out in 2004, after the assassination of BJP leader Thimmappa Naik.

In turning to jihadism, young men like Shahbandri rebelled against a traditional, Congress-allied political order that appeared to have failed to defend the rights of Muslims.

Everything, including terrorism, has a context. Muhammad Zarar Siddibapa's story helps us understand that context. Police will, more likely than not, find the man they've seen on closed-circuit television — but the task of addressing the circle of hate that produced him will be even more difficult.

All you need to know about arrested Indian Mujahideen founder Yasin Bhatkal - Firstpost

 

[hit&run]

How big is the homegrown terror threat? Video: NDTV.com

A sick man Mani Shankar Aiyer has become.

 

[bennedose]

Let us give him a speedy send off to his jannatul firdous. Launch him right away.

No. This guy will be an encyclopedia of information. He needs to be stir fried and slow cooked until every last bit of information can be squeezed out of him and corroborated with information from other catches who will be similarly squeezed. Execution is too easy.

 

[Singh]

Subramanian Swamy in an interview with Barkha Dutt said that FBI has no role to play in this capture, but Saudi Arabia. He suspects that Bhatkal was caught in KSA, moved to Nepal, and a dog-and-pony show about him being captured there was put up.

This is entirely possible re: a dog and pony show. Usually people caught on the border means they were shipped, and planted.

 

[parijataka]

Vicky Nanjappa on Yasin Bhatkal and other issues.

 

[JBH22]

How big is the homegrown terror threat? Video: NDTV.com

A sick man Mani Shankar Aiyer has become.

In their quest to obtain the best sycophant award from Madam ji, this old man is in decay both intellectual and physical

 

[Raj30]

How prosperous Bhatkal town earned terror tag - The Times of India
BHATKAL: The town in Uttara Kannada district has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Bhatkal, 120 km from Karwar, was once the district's most prosperous town. For its predominant Muslim population, economic prosperity rode on the 1960s Gulf boom when Muslim youth went to West Asia to work. The flow of petro dollars fed smuggling operations in electronic goods and gold as well. By the 1990s, Bhatkal had transformed into a hotbed of communal violence.

A trivial clash between the youth of two communities led to riots. The town was kept under curfew for three months without break. In 1996, a sitting BJP MLA Dr U Chittaranjan was shot dead by an assailant whose identity hasn't been established till date.

The Muslims here are Nawayats, said to be descendents of Arabs who came to Bhatkal to trade 1,000 years ago. Nawayats have a Jain infl ence, Bhatkal earlier dominated by Jains.

The town's been hyphenated with the Bhatkal terrorists, Yasin Bhatkal and his IM comrades in-arms, brothers Riyaz and Iqbal. Today people from Bhatkal are not welcomed. "We don't get rooms in hotels or seats in educational institutions. It's a stigma," says Ashok, a trader.

A police officer who worked in Bhatkal in the 1990s said Yasin's sleeper cells are still suspected to operate in Bhatkal. They provide logistical support to Yasin and his groups. Smuggling is intertwined with terror activities, he says.

 

[nrupatunga]

Why Pakistan may have jettisoned Yasin Bhatkal

The curious circumstances under which Abdul Karim Tunda was arrested on the Indo-Nepal border raised more questions than answers. At the ripe age of 70, Tunda appeared to be a spent force. Within days of his arrest, he was operated at the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences hospital and fitted with a pacemaker (all at the cost of the Indian taxpayer). It almost seemed like he had come for 'medical tourism' as many Pakistanis do. Anyone who has studied the insurgency in the north-east is well aware how old insurgents used to 'surrender' and live a peaceful retired life, all choreographed by the rebel outfits themselves.

Several fugitives wanted by the United States, United Kingdom and China have been arrested in Pakistan and handed over to the other countries. This was however never done in case of wanted fugitives of Indian origin.

It is not unlikely that an American nudge and pressure to do this has been a significant factor in all these happenings. But it must be acknowledged that when it comes to their national interests, Pakistanis are known to play hard-ball, unlike Indians. With Indian economy in a tailspin of its own making, the Indians also will be willing to toe the American line on Pakistan. It seems that the Indian government is laying the groundwork for the September meeting between Sharif and Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of United Nations General Assembly. This may well be followed by the visit by the Indian PM to Pakistan early in 2014. This will fit in well with his desires and the ruling party's plans to milk this for its electoral success in May 2014.