One of the members of the Base Movement, a home grown terror outfit, who were arrested from Madurai on Sunday night for allegedly carrying out low intensity explosions at five judicial courts in south India has told interrogators that they were against the ‘barbaric practices propagated by the Islamic State (IS)’ and believed that al-Qaeda ideology was the only way to ‘Islamise’ the country.
A senior Home Ministry official told The Hindu that the module wanted to register its presence and at a time when there was a huge traction towards IS, the Syria-Iraq-based outfit, the accused said they wanted to follow the al-Qaeda pattern.
‘Aim was to spread fear’
As reported by The Hindu , the accused told the investigators that their aim was not to kill but only spread fear.
The official said that this is the reason that the explosive devices planted by them were of low intensity, devoid of shrapnel and were placed in such locations so as to cause no casualty.
The official said the group’s leader was Dawood Suleiman (23), a software engineer and a resident of Madurai.
The other four accused — N. Abbas Ali (27), M. Samsun Kareem Raja (23), M. Ayub Ali (25) and Samsudeen — are also residents of Madurai and they met at a local mosque.
“This group has nothing to do with the al-Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), the Indian arm of al-Qaeda that was created in 2013. They were only inspired by the terrorist outfit,” said the official.
One of the other accused, Shamsudeen who was arrested on Tuesday was earlier associated with Al Ummah, another defunct terror group in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. He was arrested in 2013.
Police studied patterns of blasts
An official said the Base Movement was created a year ago and they started carrying out the explosions since April this year.
The breakthrough came as police studied the pattern of the blasts and with the help of witnesses zeroed in on Shamsudeen (25), also a resident of Madurai.
“All the blasts occurred at judicial courts close to Tamil Nadu. The group was cautious enough to not use any electronic communication. During investigations, we found about the movement of Shamsudeen in those areas,” said the official.
The accused wanted to take revenge on the judiciary for the death sentences given to 2001 Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, 1993 Mumbai serial blasts convict Yakub Memon and other cases where Muslims have been prosecuted by courts.
During the explosion on November 1 at a court in Mallapuram in Kerala, the accused had left a pen drive, which contained threat messages against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the official said. The pen drive also contained messages against the American, Russian and Israel embassies.
Another accused who was arrested on Tuesday was identified as Mohammed Ayub Ali (25), who had been detained last night and also a resident of Madurai.
