JOIN USA special team of the National Investigation Agency (NIA), handling high-profile terror cases and other security issues across the country, has arrived in the City to interrogate the 14 youths arrested by the Central Crime Branch for their suspected terror links.
B Dayananda, Joint Commissioner (Crime - East), heading the investigations, told Deccan Herald, “A special team of the NIA has arrived. We have given them access to the youth and they are interrogating them.”
Sources said top sleuths from the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB), besides the anti-terror squads from Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra — where men suspected of having links with the busted terror modules in the State were picked up — are also in the City.
Sources said the alleged modus operandi of the busted module was unique — target individual and specific persons for assassination — deviating significantly from the earlier strategy of mass killings by triggering bomb blasts.
Sources said anti-terror agencies of other states have also requested the CCB for access to the suspects for interrogation. “We will allow agencies from the other states, too, to question them. But that will be after we finish our interrogations in the case,” Dayananda said.
Youths radicalised
All the 14 youths, the police claimed, were radicals and indoctrinated to fight for the good of their religion.
A senior officer said the youths had crossed the thin line between orthodoxy, fundamentalism and radicalisation. Most of the arrested youths were from Hubli where the seeds of terror were sown in their minds a couple of years ago, one of the senior officers of CCB said.
The police pointed fingers at the two medical students from KIMS Hubli arrested in 2008 for their suspected terror links. Zakir, a hardcore SIMI leader, is said to have indoctrinated many youths in the district, some of whom are among the arrested.
“It is the persecution complex among the minority youth that the radicals exploit. They select such youngsters to attend religious seminars and other meetings. They supply inciting material on the Babri Masjid demolition, the Godhra riots of 2002, the recent violence in Assam, and the Afghan and Iraq wars,” said another officer.
“The arrested youths too possessed such material. We are now examining the contents of the laptops and hard disks seized from the suspects. We are also examining the contents of the many Urdu jihadi books found on them.
Many have been radicalised by reading ‘Inspire’, an online journal of the al-Qaeda,” Dayananda said.