After Bhatkal brothers,Yasin could be IM’s top man for operations

The Delhi Police said Yasin was controlling the affairs of the six alleged IM men arrested from Chennai,Delhi and Bihar,making him a pivotal figure in the IM set-up.

The naming of Yasin by the six persons,alleged to be part of the module that carried out three attacks in 2010 — the German Bakery blast in Pune,the blast at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore and the Jama Masjid firing in New Delhi — has also changed existing knowledge on IM’s leadership in India to some extent.

In fact,a senior police official described Yasin as the third most important IM operative after the fugitive Bhatkal brothers,Riyaz and Iqbal Shahbandri,who founded the group.

Accounts provided to the police by an IM operative Salman alias Chotu arrested in March 2010 had earlier indicated that a member of the Azamgarh module of the group,identified as Dr Shanawaz Alam,was handling IM affairs since the escape of Riyaz and Iqbal to Pakistan in September-October 2008.

The 28-year-old Yasin’s name first figured after the September 2008 Delhi blasts,in which he is learnt to have used the alias of Shahrukh and supplied 10 bombs to the arrested IM militants.

He has also been linked to the Pune German Bakery blast as the suspected bomber and the August 25,2007 Hyderabad twin blasts as an explosives expert but had previously not been identified as the leader of IM’s activities in India.

Yasin,who according to the dossier prepared by central intelligence agencies,is well-versed in Urdu,Kannada and Nawayati,is believed to have escaped from the country following the Shahbandri brothers after the 2008 crackdown on IM. He has a passport (E-4682508I) issued from Bangalore in 1983 — his year of birth — which is valid up to 2013.

Hailing from the coastal Karnataka region of Bhatkal like the much older Shahbandri brothers,Yasin gained notoriety after he was identified on the basis of grainy CCTV images as the suspected bomber in the German Bakery case.

The arrest of his brother Abdul Samad in May 2010 and misguided implication in the Pune case and his subsequent release also drew attention to Yasin and his alleged activities.

Prior to the German Bakery case,Yasin had been identified by an IM operative,Mohammed Saif,arrested in connection with the September 13,2008 serial blasts in New Delhi that killed 30 people,as the man in Udupi in Karnataka from whom he collected the explosives. Yasin had introduced himself as Shahrukh to Saif.

In September 2008,Pune resident Mohammed Akbar Ismail Chaudhry,accused in the August 25,2007 Hyderabad twin blasts case that killed 42 people,told interrogators that Yasin trained him and an associate,Anique Shaikh,arrested in the same case,in bomb-making at a farmhouse in Chikmagalur district of Karnataka.