Sinister face of Kerala Jihadi’s exposed

Sinister face exposed
The Pioneer Edit Desk
NIA shows how LeT recruits local cadre

The chargesheet the NIA has filed in the Special CBI Court in Kochi in the case pertaining to the SIMI camp held at Panayikkulam near Aluva on Independence Day, 2006, offers further evidence of how jihadis have turned peaceful Kerala into their terror base. The NIA has made the startling observation that the main call the speakers had made to the camp’s participants was to wage war against the nation for the “liberation of Kashmir”. The illegal assembly advocated, incited and abetted unlawful activities to “liberate Kashmir from India” and to encourage “hatred and contempt” towards the Government of India, the agency has said. Those who addressed the participants of the camp also protested against legislations like TADA and POTA, formulated for the nation’s security, as “anti-Muslim” and as instruments for “suppressing the fighters of Kashmir”. The main speakers at the camp were dreaded terrorists PA Shaduli of Irattupetta, Kottayam, and Ansar of Aluva, both presently lodged at Sabarmati Jail for their role in the devastating Ahmedabad bombings. Shaduli is the brother of Shibily, also a terrorist. The NIA has put together enough evidence to conclude that the various terror-related incidents in Kerala since 2005 were not stray cases of “misplaced anger of Muslim youth”, as certain activists would want the world to believe, but acts of violence carried out with meticulous planning with the diabolic intention of turning the State into the South’s terror hub.

Also, the call for jihad to “liberate Kashmir” at the Panayikkulam SIMI camp was neither accidental nor incidental. The LeT had long back begun implementing a programme for recruiting Kerala youth into the terror network and sending them to the Kashmir Valley for hands-on training in jihad. The killing of four Kerala militants, recruited into LeT by its south India ‘commander’ Thadiyantavide Nazeer, by security forces ar Kupwara in October 2008 bears testimony to this. Despite all this, the Kerala Police, which had earlier investigated the Panayikkulam case, had released all the 18 participants of the SIMI camp on bail after picking them up from the scene. There were allegations that certain top police officials had gone out of their way to ensure the release of these SIMI operatives. It is now clear that the Panayikkulam SIMI camp was where the seeds of many terror strikes in the country were sown; the SIMI training camp at the Vagamon hill resort of Idukki district in December 2007 transformed them into action plans.

However, the Kerala Police had no clue about what was happening till the Gujarat Police exposed the network after the Ahmedabad bombings. That shows the ‘efficiency’ of the Kerala Police and the ‘political will’ of the CPI(M)-led LDF Government in the State to fight back jihadi terror.

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