Late in the evening of May 30, 2006, Indian soldiers raided a Lashkar-e-Taiba safe-house on the outskirts of Tral in southern Kashmir. Hours later, after a fierce gun battle, two men in the house were killed.
The Jammu and Kashmir police soon identified one of the two as local resident Asif Jamil. The other, dark skinned, his features distinct from those of ethnic Kashmiris, was at first assumed to be a Pakistan national.
Irfan Moinuddin Attar was no Pakistani. The investigators discovered that the Kolhapur-born seminary student had travelled to his death all the way from Maharashtra, where he had joined a Students Islamic Movement of India-linked jihad cell and volunteered to train with the Lashkar.
Ever since 2006, the police across India had been searching for Mohammad Aslam Sardana, alleged to be the man who made it possible for jihadists like Attar to train in Jammu and Kashmir and across the Line of Control in Pakistan.
But after he escaped a botched September, 2006 raid on his home at the hamlet of Hanslot near Thanamandi in Jammu and Kashmir’s Rajouri district, few believed the fugitive Lashkar operative would ever be found.
On Tuesday, the Intelligence Bureau finally led the Delhi police to the fugitive Lashkar operative, a breakthrough that could cast new light on the terror group’s recruitment networks.
Large-scale recruitment
Known to his peers by the pseudonym Aslam Kashmiri, Sardana is believed to have sent more than a dozen men from Gujarat and Maharashtra across the Line of Control for combat training.
Sardana, the Maharashtra police say, played a key role in training members of an Aurangabad-based jihadist cell, which planned strikes in Gujarat three years ago.
In Gujarat, he is named as a suspect in the February 19, 2006 attempt to bomb a Mumbai-Ahmedabad train. The bid failed because the timer was wrongly set to detonate at mid-day instead of midnight.
Lashkar organiser Raziuddin Nasir, who Karnataka prosecutors have charged with planning to attack Western tourists in Goa, is also believed to have named Sardana as a key training facilitator.
Back in 1993, Sardana’s parents sent him to study at the famous Dar-ul-Uloom Falah-e-Darain seminary at Tarkeshwar in Gujarat.
During his nine years at the seminary, he acquired the titles Hafiz, denoting individuals who know the Koran by memory, and Qari, signifying those skilled in the rules that govern its recitation.
Politics, though, gripped his imagination. Sardana became friends with SIMI activist Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad Sheikh, one of the 11 Lashkar operatives arrested in Aurangabad three years ago.
Maharashtra prosecutors have charged the men with receiving 16 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 43 kg of military-grade explosive for an assault in Gujarat.
Through Sheikh, Sardana came into contact with a group of SIMI activists who wished to set up a jihadist cell to retaliate against the communal pogrom, which had torn Gujarat apart in 2002.
Among them was Zabiuddin Ansari, the still-fugitive operational chief of the Aurangabad cell. The other was Zulfikar Fayyaz Ahmad Kagazi, allegedly a key figure in the 2006 train bombing.
Early in the summer of 2005, the cell raised six jihad volunteers to travel with Sardana to Surankote, near the Line of Control in Poonch.
Mirza Fahd Beig, born in Beed, is thought to have been killed in a fire fight with Indian troops while receiving preliminary training with a Lashkar unit in the Hil Kaka mountains, above Surankote. His family thought he had travelled to Dubai to work on a construction site; they never heard from him again, nor of the five men he travelled with.
During his interrogation by the Mumbai police, Sheikh said he travelled to Surankote soon after Beig’s death to meet local Lashkar commanders. While Sheikh himself did not volunteer to cross the Line of Control, claiming ill-health, he is alleged to have promised to send more volunteers.
The police say more Maharashtra and Gujarat men continued to make their way to Jammu and Kashmir, hoping to cross the Line of Control. Attar, who studied with Sardana at the Dar-ul-Uloom Falah-e-Darain, was one of them.
Last year, four Kerala men training with a Lashkar unit in the Kupwara region were killed in fighting with the Army.
Few key members of the cell Sardana was linked to have ever been found.
Zulfikar Fayyaz Kagazi flew to Tehran on an Iran Air flight on the morning of May 9, hours before the Intelligence Bureau and Maharashtra police personnel began making arrests in Aurangabad, and then disappeared. Zabiuddin Ansari escaped the Maharashtra police pursuit after a high-speed car chase, and is believed to have made his way to a sanctuary in a Lashkar safe-house in Bangladesh.
