Organised crime networks based in Pakistan may have funded the Islamist networks responsible for Friday’s serial bombings in Uttar Pradesh, police sources have told The Hindu. Investigators believe several suspects involved in the court complex bombings had links with Iqbal Kana, a Lahore-based mafioso wanted for trans-border trafficking and pumping forged currency into India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand.Kana, a one-time resident of Kairana near Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, migrated to Pakistan over a decade ago. Early in his criminal career he helped mentor Mohammad Tufail Husseini, an Uttar Pradesh resident who has now emerged as one of the key suspects in the terror strikes. In June, the Delhi Police had recovered Rs. 3.3 million of counterfeit Indian currency from two members of Kana’s group. Investigators found that the group had recruited several women who were paid to travel between India and Pakistan with the banknotes concealed in clothing, cutlery sets and cartons of cosmetics. Part of the funds from these operations, sources in the Delhi Police said, are thought to have been used to fund the setting up of Husseini’s terror cells — cells often made up of men who had earlier been a part of organised crime operations in western Uttar Pradesh. Kana is also believed to have collaborated with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence to fund the training and travel of several of Husseini’s recruits.
Also known by his alias ‘Shahid,’ Kana is also known to have smuggled weapons into India. In 1996, the Delhi Police interdicted a weapons cache which Kana had despatched through Swiss national Christoph Zellweger and Iranian national Aziz Baltaji. Kana was declared a proclaimed offender on the basis of the recovery.
Husseini, for his part, is known to have had long-standing links with Islamist networks across India, notably in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. On December 6, 1993 – the first anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid – he helped organise the near-simultaneous bombing of five trains running between Mumbai, New Delhi, Howrah, Hyderabad and Surat. Two people were killed, and 22 injured, in the strikes.
Mujahideen Islam e-Hind, an until-then unknown group, had claimed responsibility for the 1993 strikes. Minutes after Friday’s bombings, an organisation with a near-identical name – Indian Mujahideen – asserted it had carried out the attacks. Experts believe the name is intended to distance Indian recruits to Islamist terror groups from patron organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami.
Central Bureau of Investigation detectives later arrested several members of the cell which carried out the 1993 attacks, notably Mumbai-based physician Jalees Ansari. Like the perpetrators of the court-complex bombings, Dr. Ansari said his decision to participate in terror strikes was motivated by anger over the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and the communal violence which followed it.
Husseini escaped to Pakistan, and hid out there with KanaÂ’s help until last year. He was, intelligence sources said, despatched to help strengthen the new Islamist terror cells that began emerging in Uttar Pradesh around 2005. Police believe he organised an abortive attempt to bomb a Sitapur-Delhi bus on May 26 this year, which failed after the explosive device detonated prematurely.
Like Dr. Ansari, Husseini was recruited by the co-founders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba in India – Hyderabad resident Mohammad Azam Ghauri, and Pikhuwa, Uttar Pradesh-based homeopath Abdul Karim ‘Tunda’. While Ghauri was killed in a 1999 shootout with police, ‘Tunda’ disappeared from Pakistan last year under circumstances which remain opaque.
Most members of these Islamist networks were drawn from the ranks of the Students Islamic Movement of India or organised crime groups active in the region. While terror groups needed mafia resources to secure finance and weapons, organised crime bosses used their new affiliation with the religious right to win legitimacy as defenders of their communities.