The city which witnessed a bomb blast on December 28 in which a woman was killed, has been on the terror radar for more than two decades now.
From being a safe haven for fugitives and terrorists in the 80s and 90s, Bengaluru, which went from being a Pensioner’s Paradise to the Silicon Valley of India, has been a terror target since 2000.
The city’s earliest tryst with terror started with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the assassins of the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi —Sivarasan and his associates — were tracked down to a rented house in Konanakunte in 1991. The police found their bodies. Even earlier, the city served as a hideout for Left-wing extremists from Andhra Pradesh. The first bomb blast in the city was in a church in J.J. Nagar in 2000, carried out by a hitherto unknown group, Deendar Anjuman, which had its roots in north Karnataka. The first terror attack with direct cross-border links was the shootout at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) in December 2005, where Abu Hamza, a Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist opened fire at delegates of a conference, killing one person.
A splinter group of Al Ummah, a banned terror group in Tamil Nadu, allegedly carried out the Malleswaram blast in 2013. But that was not the first time that Bengalureans heard of the group. A top leader of the group, Imam Ali, and his associates were gunned down in an outhouse in Sanjay Nagar in 2002, where they were hiding.
However, the city, though considered to be one of the most high-profile targets in the country owing to the IT corridor, has not witnessed large-scale terror attacks such as Mumbai or Delhi. Experts attribute this to lack of cross-border focus on the city. Till date, all terror attacks have been low-intensity blasts and mostly carried out by low-profile indigenous groups.
Cases cracked All the successive bomb blasts in the city — serial bomb blasts of 2008, M. Chinnaswamy Stadium blasts of 2010 and Malleswaram bomb blast of 2013 have been cracked and charge sheets filed against local jihadi splinter groups from south India.
The State acquired notoriety for indigenous jihadi terror leaders hailing from the State, the most infamous being the Bhatkal brothers: Riyaz and Iqbal Bhatkal of Indian Mujahideen. Yasin Bhatkal also hailed from this coastal town.
Hubballi was a strong base for the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and it was at a Hubballi meeting that SIMI decided to take up radical jihad, led by Safdar Nagori.
The police also busted a local potential terror module in the city and at Hubballi in 2012.
