Author: Kingshuk Nag
Publication: The Times of India
Date: September 2, 2007
Introduction: How Shahid the student became
Billal the bomber
It was late 2002. Gujarat had just undergone
the post-Godhra riots. Fourteen young men crossed over to Pakistan and walked
into the welcoming arms of ISI.
Mohammad Shahid alias Billal was not among
them, yet the event was crucial to the transformation of the lower middleclass
lad into one of India's most dreaded terrorists, now accused of being the
mastermind of the two Hyderabad blasts.
Two of the 14 men who went to Pakistan became
notorious later: Asghar Ali, who is now serving life imprisonment in Sabarmati
jail for assassinating Gujarat BJP home minister Haren Pandya; and Ghulam
Yazdani, who was gunned down by cops outside Delhi in March 2006, within hours
of the Sankat Mochan blast in Varanasi. It was Yazdani who recruited Billal
into Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami (HuJI).
The two knew each other before: they were
both members of a local Hyderabadi outfit called Darsgah Jihad-o-Shahadat
(DJS), an organisation purportedly created to defend Muslim causes (See story
below).
This is how Billal strayed into HuJI: He got
on the wrong side of law in late 2002, around the Ganesh festival. Local cops
say that Billal, who was then known by his real name Mohammad Shahid, got
into a violent scrap with Ganesh puja organisers over the erection of a pandal
on wakf land opposite M o o s a r a m b a g h Masjid. This was close to his
home in Malakpet. After police broke up the fight, Billal's brother Zahed
was booked for attempt to murder and sent to jail. A year later, Billal was
booked under section 120 IPC for conspiring to bump off local BJP leader Indrasena
Reddy. It was after this that the intermediate student of Mumtaz College absconded
and walked right into the arms of terror recruiters.
The merchants of death did not offer Billal
a position in HuJI right away: they promised the youth a passage to Saudi
Arabia and a livelihood there. They also told him that since the cops were
looking for him in Hyderabad, Kolkata would be a good place to fly out of
the country. Once in Kolkata they told him that Bangladesh would be a better
bet.
So Billal crossed the border and after that
his life changed forever. The exact sequence of events is not known to intelligence
officials, but in all likelihood he was taken to somewhere in Khulna or Bagerhat
district in South Bangladesh. These places are not more than 150 km from the
border and Bagerhat has been in the news for the last few years for persecution
of the minority Hindu community.
Now began the indoctrination of Billal and
it was done by fellow Hyderabadi Ghulam Yazdani. Yazdani, an engineering student
in Hyderabad, came from a relatively better background than Billal. More significantly,
he was a brighter chap and Billal always looked up to him. The indoctrination
process did not take too long.
Billal's first major operation came on Dussehra
day on October 12, 2005. In a strike - the logic of which is yet to be unravelled
by cops - the empty office of the task force of the Hyderabad police commissioner
was blasted by a human bomb. Dalim, the man who had been pushed across the
border, left a suicide note for his parents in Bangladesh with Billal. And
also an inexplicable note at the site of the blast that said in Urdu: "Aur
panchattar aur" (Another seventy-five). To this date the police have
not figured out what that meant.
The cops were however able to conclude that
the operation had been masterminded by Billal - through interrogation of his
brother Zahed and two Bangladeshis picked up in Hyderabad.
The police also realised that a few months
before the task force blast, Billal had come visiting Bidar, a town in northern
Karnataka just 110 km from Hyderabad. His parents allegedly went to Bidar
to meet him, but this is something that they stoutly deny.
After this, Billal became part of bigger operations
and he is believed to have had a hand in the Samjhauta Express blast that
was designed to derail the Indo-Pakistan peace process.
Following the elimination of Yazdani, Billal
emerged as the main man in HuJI with expertise in explosives. So when a bomb
went off in the Mecca Masjid just after Friday prayers in mid May, the police
was quick to point fingers at Billal.
His father came out in public to say that
his son was not a terrorist, but cops dismissed his claims. A senior police
official said the likelihood of the involvement of a brother of Billal in
the operation could not be ruled out. "He created an alibi for himself.
He got himself admitted in hospital on the day of the bomb blast and came
out the next day," the officer told TOI.
The latest is that the cops have taken into
custody a former police informer, Shadab. This man, who acted as a decoy on
behalf of the cops to contact terrorists across the border, turned renegade
a few weeks ago. Investigators think Shadab has kept in touch with Billal
all this while and if not anything has the latest photograph of the fugitive.
The cops, who only have an old worn-out picture, are desperately looking for
current images of Billal.