Al Badr hand in Kerala blasts revealed

The international terror links of the March 3, 2006 twin blasts at Kozhikode, in which South India’s LeT commander Thadiyantavide Nazeer is the prime accused, has become more obvious with the revelation that he had got training under Pakistani national and Al Badr coordinator Muhammad Fahad (30). Fahad, arrested from Mysore on October 17, 2006 as he was preparing for an attack on Vidhan Soudha, the Karantaka Legislative Assembly building in Bangalore, was in Kozhikode when the blasts took place.

Local residents and Malayalee farmers in Coorg, Karnataka, identified Fahad from a photograph shown to them by the officials of the Intelligence wing of the Kerala Police the other day as the one who was with Nazeer when he was running a camp there. With this, the investigations into the LeT terror operations in the State have reached a crucial turning point, officials say.

Local residents told the Intelligence officials headed by P Raju, Superintendent of Police (Intelligence), Thrissur Range, when they reached Coorg as part of the probe, that they had seen Fahad with Nazeer on several occasions. Fahad, whose father Abdullakoya was a Malayalee who had migrated to Pakistan decades ago, had given training to Nazeer and other LeT operatives from Kerala for several days at the Coorg camp.

The Kerala Police Intelligence team has already handed over the information regarding Nazeer’s connections with Fahad and the training camp at Coorg to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) which is investigating the terror-related cases in Kerala. According to sources, the new revelations are a surprise even to the NIA considering the magnitude of the Kerala terror network’s Pak connections.

The Intelligence wing has learned that Fahad had held several night-long training sessions and classes for Nazeer and the LeT recruits in Coorg towards the end of 2005. They assume that his visit to Kozhikode in February, 2006 was part of the continued operations. He had left Kozhikode on March 18. Sources said that Fahad, a Master’s degree-holder in Chemistry, could have assisted Nazeer and his group in carrying out the first live blasts of their terror career in Kozhikode. This meant that Fahad was in Kozhikode when the twin blasts were carried out in the city.

When he was arrested from Mysore in October, 2006, the police had seized from him and his associate weapons including AK-47 rifles and components of highly improvised explosives. The police had earlier learned that Fahad was a member of terror outfit Al Badr which was getting training from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. In this context, the Intelligence officials think that the LeT operations in Kerala under Nazeer were being directly controlled from Pakistan.

Al Badr coordinator Fahad, son of Abdullakoya who had left Iringalloor in Kozhikode district for Pakistan decades ago, used to frequently visit his relatives in Kerala. He was a regular visitor at the homes of Abdullakoya’s first wife at Kappad and his sister at Peruvayal, both in Kozhikode district. After his arrest in 2006, the police had leaned that Fahad’s mission here was to spread the terror network in the region using his family connections.

It was amidst his efforts to get a passport using the Kerala address from the Regional Passport Office in Kozhikode that Fahad and his associate Muhammad Ali Hussein were arrested from Mysore. Though Fahad was arrested by the Karnataka Police, the Kerala Police had enquired about his bid to get a passport from Kozhikode. Unfortunately, the police had not then thought of extending its probe beyond the passport case.

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