New Delhi: For nearly three months, intelligence officials in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh were working on inputs that a handler was seeking to revive terror modules with newly released prisoners as recruits.
As luck would have it, the handler contacted a former prisoner already under intelligence surveillance. An intensive analysis of his “footprint” led the Tamil Nadu and the Andhra Pradesh Police to Andhra Pradesh’s Annamaya district, where the terror handler and his accomplice were arrested Monday from a remote hideout.
The catch was no small fish, as the man arrested was Abubacker Siddique—a terror accused on the run for nearly three decades for his involvement in several cases, including the failed attempt to target former Union Home Minister and BJP veteran L.K.Advani’s Jan Chetna Yatra at Madurai in October 2011
The other suspect arrested in the joint operation coordinated by central agencies was identified as Mohammad Ali, another terror accused.
Siddique and Ali, the Tamil Nadu police said, allegedly planned various bomb blasts and targeted killings in the state dating back as far as 1995.
Siddique was behind the seven bomb blasts across Chennai, Trichy, Coimbatore and two in Kerala in 1999, the police added. He faces at least 13 cases including that of the murders of the BJP and RSS functionaries, as well as for the attacks at RSS/BJP offices in Tamil Nadu and one in Karnataka.
Siddique lay low throughout the decade between 2001 and 2011, but he remained in touch with operatives linked to the module run by another terror accused Imam Ali even after the latter was killed in an encounter in 2002.
What made him a ‘tough catch’, according to a Tamil Nadu officer, was his two broad strategies: the Nagore native did not use a mobile phone in Tamil Nadu during his visits and stayed away from contacting his old aides and accomplices.
“During the period, he was actively running the terror modules. He was never remained in one city or town for more than a day. He frequently changed locations and never came in touch with operatives who had already been arrested,” a police officer told ThePrint.
Over time, he migrated to Andhra Pradesh’s Kadapa district, where he started a women’s clothing store named Manzoor Textiles and a retail shop in Rayachoty town of the newly formed Annamayya district. Ali was running Manzoor Textiles and was travelling with him.
“Ali was deceived by Siddique who told him that he was on the police radar and that he would be killed if he escaped his company. Hence, he continued his company. There is no case against him beyond the 1999 blasts cases,” a Tamil Nadu police officer told ThePrint.
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The turning point
Hailing from a lower-middle-class family, Siddique completed an Industrial Training Institute (ITI) diploma in home district of Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu.
According to police records, he worked as a welder for three private companies in Chennai between 1989 and 1991, before securing the job of a supervisor at the local onshore project of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC) in 1991.
The turning point in his life came following the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 and the violence that followed in Tamil Nadu. He left the ONGC in 1992.
Siddique’s brush with terror operatives happened in the aftermath of the blast at the Chennai office of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) after five of the main accused, including Imam Ali, reached Nagapattinam. Eleven people were killed in the blast. Three of the accused stayed at his house in Nagore before he arranged for their stay at a hideout at Karaikal near Puducherry.
Ali introduced himself as a “mujahideen” to Siddique, the police officers said, adding that the two later met in 1995 at Mettupalayam and the latter formally joined the terror module.
The first act of terror was the blast at the office of the Right-wing group, Hindu Munnani, at Chennai’s Chintadripet. Siddique, the police officers (not officially) said, planted the bomb that killed two people and injured several others. He went on to plant another bomb in a parcel sent to the outfit’s office in Nagore town that killed a woman on 3 July 1995.
Police records show that Siddique left for Dubai to evade arrest. Later, as his passport expired in 1998, he came to Mumbai on emergency certificate (which allows one-way trip back to India) and arranged a fake passport using forged documents. He used the passport to enter Mumbai in 1998, the police records show.
It is during this period that he sheltered the 1998 Coimbatore bomb blast accused from the terrorist group Al-ummah. He gave the slip to the Tamil Nadu Police on several instances.
Having evaded arrest, Siddique’s confidence was skyrocketing, the police said, adding that he followed it up with a series of seven blasts across Tamil Nadu and Kerala in 1999.
“A lot of these attacks were directly at police establishments or prison facilities in Trichy and Coimbatore. In some cases, even footnotes were left behind to tease the police about their inability to arrest him,” a police officer told ThePrint.
By that time, Siddique established a base in Mumbai, and when his wife refused to shift in 2000, he divorced, the officer said. He married the next year, but abandoned his second wife after facing similar opposition.
Comeback plan with Advani plot
In 2011, Siddique along with two terror accused Bilal Malik and ‘Police’ Fakruddin (as his father was a retired police constable) planned to target Advani when his Jan Chetna Yatra was to reach Madurai on 27 October.
However, hours before Advani’s journey was set to take off, a resident of Alampatti spotted a long wire on the Kounda riverbed early in the morning and alerted the police.
Searches led to the recovery of a six-foot PVC pipe stuffed with 6 kg of explosive connected to a battery under a narrow bridge. The plot was foiled, and the route of Advani’s yatra was changed.
Almost a year later, he hatched a plot to kill a diabetologist in Vellore on 23 October 2012, the police said. Dr V. Arvinth Reddy, the secretary of the BJP’s state medical wing, was stabbed with a knife by motorcycle riding assailants.
In April 2013, a blast rocked the BJP’s office in Bengaluru. Fakruddin is said to have carried out the blast that injured 17 people, including 12 police personnel.
Months later, on 19 July, the BJP’s state general secretary was hacked to death near his house in Salem district. The killing has sparked widespread outrage in Tamil Nadu. The plot was revealed after the police arrested Fakruddin on 4 October.
The next day, a team of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu police arrested Malik and another module member Panna Ismail from Puttur town in Chittoor. Although there were inputs about Siddique’s presence at the exact location, he escaped the police’s grasp yet again.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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Would we still say that terrorists have no religion?
Am pretty sure that “journalists” like Arfa Khanum Sherwani and Rana Ayub would defend his actions as a “form of resistance against Hindutva”.