DNA Edit: Lankan admission – Island’s army chief confirms what is known in India

In what may come as no surprise, the chief of Sri Lanka’s army has said that some of those involved in the April 21 serial bombings in his country had  travelled to Kashmir and south India to be part of terror training programmes. The revelation, made earlier in some off-the-record briefings by Indian officials, is the first official confirmation by a top security official. It is both embarrassing and disturbing. Indian security agencies have been investigating links between the perpetrators of the Easter bombings and organisations that pose a similar threat here. The Sri Lankan General said that the purpose of these visits would have been to either train or to establish links with like-minded organisations. Officials say at least two bombers had travelled to India in 2017, but so far, no link has been found between them and Kashmir, though leads are being probed. 

Last week, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) carried out raids in Tamil Nadu and Kerala and picked up several people suspected to have links with Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Syria-based terror group that claimed responsibility for the attack. One of the key suspects is Islamic preacher Maulvi Zahran Bin Hashim — leader of Sri Lanka’s National Towheed Jama’at (NTJ). He is alleged to be the ringleader of Easter Sunday attackers. Hashim was initially part of Tamil Nadu NTJ. Wahabi-aligned NTJ has a significant presence in Tamil Nadu, particularly in districts close to the maritime boundary with Sri Lanka. As far as India is concerned, what is of particular concern is the radicalisation of Muslims in South India. There have been a number of reports of Indian youth, particularly from Kerala, Karnataka, Hyderabad, Tamil Nadu and Jammu and Kashmir, being attracted to the ISIS to the extent of going to Syria to fight on their behalf. 

India’s intelligence services are said to have alerted Sri Lankan officials at least three times on April 4, April 11 and two hours before the blasts on April 21. Very specific information regarding churches to be targeted was shared on the basis of information allegedly obtained from an ISIS suspect held in Hyderabad by the NIA. Unfortunately the Sri Lankan authorities did not act on these inputs. Even the Lankan President has acknowledged that very specific, actionable Indian intelligence inputs had been overlooked.  

In mid-2014, the ISIS had issued a map depicting parts of north and west India to be a part of the Islamic State of Khorasan. These are areas, which had been ruled by Muslim rulers in the past. As events in Sri Lanka have shown, all SAARC countries are vulnerable to ISIS threats. ISIS has a significant presence in Afghanistan and controls a few provinces. Given Pakistan’s ambivalent attitude to terrorism, it is appropriate that India takes the remaining SAARC countries, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives, into confidence and works out a multilateral protocol to combat terror, terror-financing in general and ISIS in particular.