In January this year, following his chance arrest in the Hubli region of Karnataka, Raziuddin Nasir, 21, a Hyderabad resident and a suspected terror operative, began dropping the names of several key fugitive terrorist leaders from around the world.
One of the names Nasir, the son of a cleric facing conspiracy charges in Gujarat, mentioned and claimed association with was that of Safdar Nagori, leader of a radical unit of the proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), who was arrested during the crackdown in Indore on Thursday.
Nasir claimed to be working with Nagori and Adnan, alias Hafeez Mullah — another radical SIMI leader from Bijapur in Karnataka who was also arrested last week — to train and arm youths recruited to their extremist ideology in southern India to carry out terror attacks.
While there were possibilities of associations with fugitive terror suspects from Hyderabad, one name that Nasir mentioned, however, foxed investigators.
Amid admissions of being trained at terror camps in Pakistan, Nasir told interrogators that he and his associates were in touch with Mullah Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader linked to Osama bin Laden, who controlled Afghanistan prior to 2001.
He specifically told interrogators, “Nagori Mullah Omar ka fauj bana raha tha (Nagori was building an army for Mullah Omar)”. Nasir also stated during a narco analysis test that the group interacted with a Taliban ideologue.
But investigators from the Corps of Detectives (CoD) in Bangalore who have over the past two months been probing a rag-tag group featuring medical and engineering students that was being assembled in Karnataka, allegedly by Nagori and Adnan, are yet to unearth any evidence to prove contacts between leaders of the group and the Taliban.
... contd.
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