11/7 accused among 13 SIMI radicals held

NEW DELHI/ MUMBAI: The Madhya Pradesh police on Thursday arrested 13 radicals of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), including Safdar Nagouri — one of the key accused in the Mumbai train blasts — from the industrial town of Pithampur near Indore.

Nagouri, the all-India chief of SIMI radicals, “is an important catch and we want him in connection with the serial train blasts of July 2006,” said Mumbai Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare.

“A chargesheet too has been filed against him (Nagouri) along with other accused and he is one of the prime accused in the (11/7) case,” Karkare told DNA.

The ATS is now preparing its case to bring Nagouri to Mumbai after his remand ends in Indore. “We are hopeful of getting his custody with in the next 10 days,” the ATS chief said.

Karkare said Nagouri’s “involvement in the blasts came to the light after the interrogation of other arrested accused and we had even sent a team to his home town Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh but he could not be traced at that time”.

Another case under the Unlawful Activities Act against 38-year-old Nagouri is also pending with the city police, sources said.

According to intelligence sources, Nagouri is the leader of the breakaway radical group of SIMI. Over the years, he developed differences with the original leader Abrar Ahmed.

“While Abrar believed in a sustained struggle against the establishment, Nagouri wanted more violent attacks in quick succession in different parts of the country”, a senior intelligence official said.

The Indore arrests, according to authoritative sources, almost complete the picture of what could have been the most powerful and intrepid network of homegrown terrorists wanting to strike in Mumbai, Goa and other key strategic targets.

Detonators and timers were in place and hydrogen peroxide would have been the key component of the bomb. What may have delayed their bloody run was the arrest of several of their supporters in Karnataka earlier this year.

Some key members of this violence-preaching SIMI faction are still missing, but police sources in Karnataka, where the network’s reach and plans surfaced in recent months, say Indore arrests are a huge step towards containing home-bread terrorism.

According to intelligence officials, the Nagouri-led faction held two crucial secretive meetings in Madhya Pradesh in 2007. It was at these meetings that the Nagouri faction decided to launch full-fledged into terror.  

Highly-placed sources told DNA that among those present at these meetings was Raziuddin Nasir, who was arrested in Karnataka on January 11. Nasir is the son of radical Hyderabad cleric Maulana Naseeruddin, who is in jail for allegedly plotting terror activities in Gujarat and murder of Haren Pandya.

Interrogation of Nasir and several others arrested after him revealed the network of a resurgent SIMI faction that was planning to carry out terror strikes across India. Among their key targets were foreign tourists, especially Israelis in Goa, some strategic installations in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat and elsewhere. Nasir and associates had also travelled several times to Maharashtra to plan strikes in Mumbai and elsewhere.

Nasir has also been to Pakistan, where he established close relations with Shahid Bilal, the Hyderabad resident who is reportedly behind the string of bomb blasts in Andhra Pradesh and Bangalore.

Sources say the Nagouri-led group was planning to carry out bomb blasts using hydrogen peroxide, which proved its effectiveness in the London tube bombings of July 2005.

This network of Islamic terrorists, mostly from southern states, has a huge support base in Madhya Pradesh from where Nagouri and some other key operatives were working, they said.

A senior Karnataka government source said, “This is the resurgent face of SIMI and I think we have busted them before they could strike further.”

After Nasir’s arrest in Karnataka, the rattled SIMI leaders had swiftly gone into hiding. In fact, within hours of the media reporting the arrest of Nasir and his friend Mohammed Asadullah from Davangere region on January 11, a key SIMI activist in Karnataka was able to move a cache of arms, detonators and other items out of Nasir’s home.

“He confessed about the cache only two days after his arrest. By the time we reached the safe-house it had been moved,” says a police source, admitting that they are still hunting for this cache.

Nagouri’s deputies in SIMI’s violent mission are both from Kerala. At least one of them, Shibly (Peedical Abdul), is among those arrested along with Nagouri.