The electrical engineer is also considered a key associate of another engineer Adnan alias Hafeez from Bijapur in Karnataka, currently being sought by the police as the lynchpin behind the efforts to build a SIMI network in Karnataka. “Mohammed Yahya, who was employed by a major Indian IT company before joining the multi-national unit, seems to be the same person who was questioned by the Kerala and Mumbai police for his links to Abu Sultan,” a senior investigator said.

Yahya had been living in a rented house in south Bangalore for the past year. He was asked to step down from his last employment two months ago after his company found him stealing data and using it for a company he had created on his own. He had also been found to be actively involved in sending e-mails containing jihadi literature to colleagues, an investigator said.

The Karnataka police suspect that a network of the banned SIMI was being built in Karnataka in an effort to provide support to foreign-trained terrorists to carry out operations in the region.

Whle the Bangalore cops who have arrested him paint Yahya as a terror suspect, his family in Mukkom village of Kozhikode insists the charge is preposterous. His father says it’s unthinkable that his son could gravitate towards any kind of militant crowd.

Until he passed out of the National Institute of Technology in Kozhikode in 1996 with a degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering, and got employed at Tata Infotech in Bangalore through campus recruitment, Yahya was Nellikkaparambil Kammukkutty. He had later officially renamed himself as Yahya Kammukkutty.

... contd.