Author: Praveen Swami
Publication: New Age Islam
Date: February 1, 2010
URL: http://www.newageislam.org/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=2440
Zabiuddin Ansari may have guided Mumbai assault
team
NEW DELHI: Mumbai police investigators say
they may have succeeded in putting a face to an until now unidentified Indian
Lashkar-e-Taiba operative who played a key role in guiding the operations
of the team that attacked Mumbai in November 2008.
Based on information provided by India's intelligence
services, as well as interviews with arrested jihadists, police believe the
Indian national in the Lashkar's control room could be Syed Zabiuddin Syed
Zakiuddin Ansari, a Lashkar-linked Maharashtra resident, who has been a fugitive
since 2005.
The unidentified Indian operative was one
of several Lashkar personnel who used Voice-Over-Internet Protocol (VOIP)
links to provide orders to the assault team. Last month, The Hindu broke the
news that one of the operatives in the control station spoke Mumbai-inflected
Hindi, in stark contrast to the Punjabi used by the others.
Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, the Lashkar terrorist
arrested in the course of the assault, said his team had been trained by an
Indian national identified as Abu Jindal - the alias also used by the unidentified
controller, and a nom de guerre known to have been adopted by Ansari in the
past. Police say Ansari played a key role in a plot to assassinate Gujarat
Chief Minister Narendra Modi, an operation meant to avenge the 2002 anti-Muslim
pogrom in Gujarat. Ansari is alleged to have been the key leader of an Aurangabad-based
Lashkar cell, which received assault rifles and military-grade explosives
from Pakistan to stage an attack which would have closely resembled the Mumbai
operation.
Eleven men linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba and
Students Islamic Movement of India were held for their alleged role in the
2005 Aurangabad-based plot. However, Ansari eluded the police after a high-speed
car chase and has been sought by Interpol since then. He was last sighted
at a Lashkar safe house in Karachi by Hyderabad-based jihadist Mohammad Amjad
Khwaja, who was arrested earlier this year.
Imran Babar, one of the two terrorists who
took hostages at the Chabad House Jewish prayer centre, was told by the Hindi-speaking
controller to call the media with a manifesto to condemn what he described
as the Indian government's "two-faced policy" towards Muslims.
The Lashkar manifesto demanded that Muslims
held in jails be released; the Indian Army be pulled out of Jammu and Kashmir;
and the land on which the Babri Masjid stood be returned to Muslims.
"Tell them this is just the trailer,"
the Mumbai-accented Lashkar-e-Taiba controller ordered two terrorists to tell
the media during the November 2008 assault on Mumbai. "The real movie
is still to come."
Based on interviews with arrested jihadists,
and data provided by India's intelligence services, Mumbai police investigators
now believe the unidentified voice intercepted in the course of the assault
is that of Maharashtra-origin jihadist Syed Zabiuddin Syed Zakiuddin Ansari.
Indian intelligence services say that Ansari,
operating out of terror camps in Karachi and Pakistan-administered Kashmir,
is a key figure in the jihadist group's plan to realise the threat he ordered
the assault team to deliver.
Ansari's story helps to understand the Pakistan-based
networks which remain the key security threat to India - and also to comprehend
the role of Hindu chauvinism in watering the political soil which gave birth
to its jihadist movement.
Born on November 13, 1981, Ansari grew up
in the town of Gevrai, in the midst of Beed district's rich cotton and sugarcane
fields. His father, Zakiuddin Ansari, worked as a small-time insurance agent,
struggling to bring up five daughters - and his only son. Ansari studied at
Gavarai's Zilla Parishad-run High School up to standard X, and then acquired
an electrician's qualifications at the Indian Technical Institute in Beed.
He was studying for a master's at the Navgan Shikshan Sanstha College when
he became a fugitive.
Little is known of the processes that led
Ansari to the Lashkar, but it is likely that part of the answer lies in the
communal violence which formed an organic part of the cultural fabric of his
early life.
Following a wave a communal riots across Maharashtra
in the summer of 1984, the Shiv Sena took control of the Brihanmumbai Municipal
Corporation and pushed forward communal mobilisations in rural areas. Umapur,
not far from Gevrai, saw murderous anti-Muslim violence in 1986. Later, tensions
surged after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. In 2001, a statue of the
warrior-king Shivaji Raje Bhonsale was chipped by Shiv Sena activists in a
near-successful effort to provoke communal riots.
Many young Muslims believed that the community's
traditional leadership had failed to defend it from assault. Some - including
Ansari - turned to the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), for solutions.
Journey into Lashkar
"Islam is our nation, not India,"
thundered Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad at the SIMI's 1999 convention in Aurangabad
- a convention that saw the Maharashtra jihadists make their first known contacts
with the Lashkar leadership.
No one is certain just when Ansari was drawn
to the SIMI, but he is known to have been close to key Aurangabad-based members
of the Islamist organisation - among them Ahmad - by the time the convention
took place.
In 2001, Gujarat police investigators say,
Ansari met with Khalid Sardana, a Jammu and Kashmir resident studying at a
seminary in the State, to discuss the prospect of sending SIMI cadre there
for weapons training. Later that year, Sardana took several of Aurangabad
men to train with Lashkar units in the mountains of Surankote, near Poonch.
At least one, Fahd Sheikh, is now known to have been killed in fighting with
Indian troops in Hil Kaka.
The Gujarat police investigators believe that
Ansari and Zulfikar Fayyaz Ahmad 'Kagazi,' who went to place a bomb on a Mumbai-Ahmedabad
express train in February 2006, were also present at the meeting.
Last summer, when the Delhi police finally
arrested Sardana after an intelligence-led pursuit through Pakistan and Bangladesh,
he said several Maharashtra jihadists - including Ansari - continued to flit
in and out of Lashkar-run camps near Muzaffarabad and Dulai, in Pakistan-administered
Kashmir.
Following the 2002 communal pogrom in Gujarat,
these training operations intensified. Mumbai-based SIMI operative Rahil Sheikh,
the investigators say, was tasked with securing passports and tickets for
SIMI volunteers who travelled to Lashkar-run camps through the porous Iran-Pakistan
border. Among the first to go, police say, was Ansari.
Communal pogrom
Most of Sheikh's operatives were raised in
the wake of the 2002 communal pogrom. Feroze Ghaswala, a Mumbai-based automobile
mechanic, volunteered for the jihad after witnessing the burial of dozens
of people killed in the violence.
Ghaswala travelled to Srinagar, hoping to
meet jihadists at a religious gathering addressed by neoconservative preacher
Zakir Naik in 2003. Instead, he ran into Sheikh - starting a journey which
ended with his arrest in New Delhi.
Despite the collapse of the Ghaswala plot,
Sheikh continued to work on operations to avenge the Gujarat pogrom. In 2005,
he shipped Kalashnikov assault rifles and military-grade explosives into Aurangabad,
using organised crime networks to transport the material across the Indian
Ocean from Karachi.
Police say Ansari was to lead a group of Lashkar-trained
Indian jihadists who would have used the equipment to assassinate Gujarat
Chief Minister Narendra Modi - an operation that would have closely resembled
the November 2008 attack on Mumbai in its tactics and execution.
Eleven SIMI-linked men were arrested after
the intelligence services penetrated the plot - but Ansari evaded police in
a high-speed chase, and escaped to Pakistan.
Besides the victims of his attacks, Ansari's
family paid a high price for his actions. Naved-ur-Rehman Khan, who had married
Ansari's sister Rafia Parveen, divorced her as news of the Aurangabad plot
broke. "We had been together just three weeks," he says, "but
I didn't want anything to do with this trouble."
