Banned Al-Ummah in a regroup bid?

A possible re-emergence of banned Muslim outfit, Al-Ummah, which planned the ghastly Coimbatore serial blasts of February 1998 targeting BJP leader L K Advani at an election rally then, has flummoxed investigators probing last week’s Bangalore bomb blast, with one of the suspects arrested early on Tuesday in Madurai having an Al-Ummah past.

Intelligence sleuths and investigators are particularly interested in ‘Kitchen’ Bhuhari for his links with the proscribed organisation. 

Bhuhari, arrested in Madurai on Tuesday in connection with the Malleswaram blast case, is running an NGO and working for a small construction company in Tirunelveli, top police sources in Chennai said.

Sources said his wife Jameela Banu had filed a habeus corpus petition at the local court in Madurai.

Bhuhari was then a member of Al-Ummah and was a prime accused in the Coimbatore blasts case. However, sources say he was acquitted in the case for want of evidence. But he was convicted in the murder case of a Hindu bakery owner in Tirunelveli and had served an eight-year jail term at Coimbatore prison and was released a couple of years ago.

Sources say Bhuhari had fallen off the radar and had resurfaced in the investigation of the Malleshwaram blast case.

Significantly, all the three arrested in Tamil Nadu, besides two others, Rasul Mohideen and Salim, who are being questioned by the Karnataka police team in co-ordination with the Tamil Nadu Q-Branch Police and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) sleuths, ‘are all from Tirunelveli area down South’.

In the early 1990s’, a suburb of Tirunelveli was one of the pockets of Islamic extremism.

Top intelligence sleuths told Deccan Herald that after one of its last leaders, Imam Ali, was gunned down at a hideout in Sanjay Nagar, Bangalore, along with four of his associates by a joint Karnataka and Tamil Nadu police team on September 29, 2002, the group had fizzled out. There were no known activities of the group. However, with the arrest of Bhuhari and the other two arrested also hailing from Melapalayam, Tirunelveli district – a former hot bed of Al Ummah, intelligence sleuths are flummoxed and are looking at whether it has regrouped.

A senior intelligence officer from the State told Deccan Herald that from the persons being arrested, he suspected that some remnants of the proscribed group may have regrouped lately in a bid at revival under some other name. He said that chances of the old members of the proscribed group joining other extremist organisations was also not ruled out. He said it was only investigations that would reveal the organisational affiliations of these men. He said that it was possible that this could have been an independent module, with no organisational affiliations.

However, he observed that the main plank of Al-Ummah in its hey days was targeting the Hindutva right. Its former attack targets include the RSS office, BJP leaders including L K Advani, local Hindu right leaders of Hindu Makkal Kathchi and Hindu Munnani. He said that in Malleswaram, too, the target was the BJP state head office ‘Jagannath Bhavan’ and this was a characteristic target of Al-Ummah, if it were to be active today. 

Significantly, in the Tamil Nadu Assembly, as Chief Minister J Jayalalitha moved the demands for grants for Home Department under her charge on Tuesday, revealed that a special division has been created in the State Police Department to monitor fundamentalist organisations including banned outfits like Al-Ummah, after the deadly Coimbatore serial blasts.

Further, Tamil Nadu has also banned the ‘All India Jihad Committee’ and ‘Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI)’. But ‘SIMI’, however, is regrouping under the banner of ‘Wahadat-e-Islami Hind (Wel), Jayalalitha pointed out.