In the hour before the police raided the bomb-making factory he ran on the fringes of the Bhadra forests near Chikmagalur in Karnataka, key Indian Mujahideen operative Muhammad Zarar Siddibapa slipped away on a bus bound for Mangalore — and then, across the Bangladesh border, to the safety of a safe house run by the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Karachi.
Delhi Police investigators claimed on Wednesday to have found evidence that Siddibapa is back in India, commanding the jihadist cell responsible for three major terrorist attacks since 26/11: multiple bombs placed outside the Chinnaswamy stadium in Bangalore; an incident of shooting at visitors to Delhi's historic Jama Masjid on the eve of the Commonwealth Games; and, most lethal of all, the improvised explosive device that ripped through a Pune café in February 2010, killing 17 people.
Siddibapa escaped the Delhi Police-led raids that resulted in the arrest of seven alleged members of the cell over the weekend, including small-time Karachi gangster-turned-terrorist Muhammad Adil.
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The still unfolding investigation into the cell he commanded, though, has made clear what 26/11 terrorist David Headley called “the Karachi Project” is still flourishing — the war by Pakistan-based terrorist groups like the LeT against India.
The loyal lieutenant
More than three years after police investigators first identified Siddibapa as a terror suspect, little is known about the man alleged to have played a central role in the Indian Mujahideen's urban terror campaign that claimed hundreds of lives in 10 cities between 2005 and 2008.
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Educated at the well-respected Anjuman Hami-e-Muslimeen school in the affluent coastal Karnataka town of Bhatkal, Siddibapa left for Pune as a teenager. He was later introduced to other members of the Indian Mujahideen as an engineer but the Pune police have found no documentation suggesting he had ever studied in the city. Instead, the police say, Siddibapa spent much of his time with a childhood friend, Unani medicine practitioner-turned-Islamist proselytiser Iqbal Ismail Shahbandri.
Iqbal Shahbandri and his brother Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri, now the Indian Mujahideen's top military commander in Karachi, became ideological mentors for many young Islamists in Pune and Mumbai, many of them highly educated professionals.
The brothers were unlikely terrorists: their father, Ismail Shahbandri, had set up a leather tanning factory in Mumbai's Kurla area in the mid-1970s and struggled to give his children a head start. Riyaz Shahbandri went on to obtain a civil engineering degree from Mumbai's Saboo Siddiqui Engineering College. In 2002, he was married to Nasuha Ismail, daughter of an electronics store owner in Bhatkal's Dubai Market.
Nasuha Ismail's brother, Shafiq Ahmad, is believed to have drawn Riyaz Shahbandri into the Students Islamic Movement of India. Riyaz Shahbandri first met his Indian Mujahideen co-founders, Abdul Subhan Qureshi and Sadiq Israr Sheikh, in the months before his marriage. Later, he also made contact with ganglord-turned-jihadist Amir Raza Khan. In the wake of the 2002 communal violence in Gujarat, the men set about sending recruits to Lashkar camps in Pakistan.
Early in the summer of 2004, investigators say, the core members of the network, which was later to call itself the Indian Mujahideen, met at Bhatkal's cheerfully named Jolly Beach to discuss their plans. Siddibapa had overall charge — illustrating his status as the brothers' most loyal lieutenant.
From the testimony of Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley to Indian and United States investigators, it is clear the terror project continued long after several Indian Mujahideen operatives were arrested in 2008 — and the Indian Mujahideen leadership fled to Karachi. Headley told the National Investigation Agency that there were two distinct, competing jihadist projects targeting India, both headquartered out of Karachi.
Lashkar commanders, Headley said, ran one Karachi Project, using dozens of cadre recruited from the ranks of Islamist groups in India. He claimed the 26/11 assault team initially included an “Indian, possibly from Maharashtra.” Headley also said another Maharashtra resident, who used the alias Abu Ajmal, trained with him at the Lashkar's intelligence-tradecraft in August 2003.
The second Karachi Project, NIA documents reveal, was run by a retired Pakistani military officer called Abdur Rehman Hashim, also known by the code name ‘Pasha.'
This second group of Indian jihadists, Headley told the NIA, was a “personal set-up of Pasha, and it is independent of the LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba].”
Major Hashim, according to Headley's account, had served with the 6 Baloch Regiment until 2002, when he refused to lead his troops into combat against Taliban fleeing from the Tora Bora complex in Afghanistan — the last stronghold of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in that country. Later, having been demoted to captain, he resigned his commission and joined the Lashkar as an instructor — training, among others, the men who attacked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's rally in Srinagar in 2004.
But Major Hashim later fell out with the Lashkar — incensed, like many jihadists, by its refusal to take on the Pakistani state and the western forces in Afghanistan. He threw his weight behind al-Qaeda's Brigade 313, which later claimed credit for the Pune bombing.