The suave engineer who kept vanishing

Abdul Subhan Qureshi alias Tauqeer is tech-savvy, extremely radicalised and has excellent oratory skills. Every time security agencies cracked down on SIMI or IM, he just vanished.

He speaks English well and has deep knowledge of local as well as international issues. He could easily influence and motivate impressionable minds into waging Jihad.

He studied at a missionary school in Mumbai's Byculla, and earned his diploma in Industrial Electronics from Bharati Vidyapeeth University in Pune. He started working as a customer support engineer at a company in Mumbai. During this period, he also attended weekly programmes of SIMI in Kurla.

He became a member of SIMI in 1996, and by 2000, he transformed into a radical youth. He got the task of editing the English edition of SIMI magazine 'Islamic Movement'.

He left his job in Mumbai and moved to Delhi's Zakir Nagar. There, he grew close to Safdar Nagori, the then general secretary of SIMI's central advisory committee.

SIMI was banned in September 2001 but Qureshi escaped arrest and shifted base to Bijapur in Karnataka. Nagori appointed him head of Karnataka operations.

He started travelling to Bhatkal and revived his association with Riyaz and came in contact with Iqbal. At that time Bhatkal was the centre of radical youths and Qureshi was by now second in command of SIMI and a co-founder of IM along with Riyaz and Iqbal. He became the bridge between SIMI and IM.

By 2005, he diverted his energies to carrying out action in Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Qureshi went to Ranchi in Jharkhand then to Bihar's Chhapra and thereafter to Nepal where he met Nizam Khan, a SIMI sympathiser, who ran an NGO, Nepal Development Society. He informed Khan about his SIMI links but did not disclose his IM links. With Khan's help he started to teach English at Christian Boarding School. He stayed there from October 2008 to January 2009 and then moved to Gorkha.

Qureshi managed to get a Nepali passport in the name of Abdul Rehman. He again came in touch with Riyaz who motivated him to come to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia in 2015 to arrange finances and revive IM in India. On return, he started to visit India to revive IM.