Indian officials said they were verifying a message posted by a pro-Islamic State (IS) Telegram channel which identified Saifullah, who was killed in an encounter in Lucknow earlier this week, as a soldier of the ‘caliphate.’
A senior official in the Intelligence establishment told The Hindu that the “time gap” between the Lucknow encounter and the time when the message was circulated on the Telegram channels showed that the IS was not directly behind it.
Saifullah was part of the alleged terror module, which planted a bomb on a train near Bhopal on March 7. The messages have been circulating on mobile application Telegram since March 9, two days after the incident.
An official said they were suspicious of the message as it was not posted by the official channels of the IS, but by a group supporting the terror organisation and was part of “casual conversation” among its sympathisers.
Police backtracked
After initially claiming that the nine-member module belonged to the IS, the Uttar Pradesh police retracted the statement and said the group was “self radicalised” and was inspired by the IS.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh also did not mention IS in his statement to Parliament. He however, described Saifullah, who was shot dead by Uttar Pradesh police, as a “suspected terrorist.”
U.S.-based intelligence website Site Intel Group posted a screen grab of the Telegram message on Twitter, which said, “Pro-#ISIS Telegram Channel Incites for Attacks in #India, Points to Suspected IS Fighter Saifullah as Example.” The website also posted a photograph of Saifullah describing him as a “soldier of the Khilafah from India.” The photo was juxtaposed with a message in Urdu, Arabic and English. It said, “Think not of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead, Nay, they are alive, with their Lord, and they have provision.”
A security establishment official said: “ We are verifying the message but we have seen in the past that whenever IS has claimed an attack, it posts pictures of its members taken much before they are killed. In this case, they have posted a photograph, which was released by the U.P. police.”
The U.P. police said the accused were self-proclaimed members of the IS and had even recovered a hand-painted signature black flag of the IS from the rented house on the outskirts of Lucknow, where Saifullah was killed. The low-intensity bomb, which the other members planted on a train was made of potassium chlorate, which is commonly available in the market.
“IS Telegram channels are not necessarily run by the IS hierarchy itself. I see it as a groundswell ‘movement’, a cadre-oriented relatively ‘democratic’ way of orchestrating terror activities where attackers and orchestrators perhaps look for IS blessings (via Amaq News Agency and so on) after a successful operation,” said Kabir Taneja, associate fellow, Observer Research Foundation.
While the Home Minister avoided naming any outfit for the alleged terror attack on a passenger train, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan told a news agency on Wednesday that the accused belonged to the IS and had even sent the photograph of the bomb to their handler in Syria.
Eight people have been arrested so far in raids across M.P and U.P.
