MADURAI: Six days ago, Andhra Pradesh Police were placed on high alert after the Commercial Taxes Department at Kattamanchi in Chittoor received a letter, purportedly written by the activists of Al Ummah, a terror outfit based in Tamil Nadu.
In the letter, the outfit said it was behind the April 7 bomb blast at the Chittoor district court complex while Chintu alias S Chandrasekhar, the prime accused in the murder of the town’s mayor and her husband last year, was being produced there. The letter did not threaten of any action either in Chittoor or elsewhere, but bore an image of slain al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
This is one of the many threats issued by Al Ummah in the last several years. In fact, Madurai has seen several such instances of the outfit issuing threats and carrying out low-intensity bomb blasts in the past, with the latest one causing damage to a lorry near Yanaikkal bridge in the wee hours of June 4.
But why this unending trail of blasts? How did the temple city fall into the clutches of terror?
It all began with the encounter killing of Al Ummah sympathiser Imam Ali in Bengaluru in 2002. Subsequently, his sympathisers and supporters formed an outfit Al-mum Touheem Force (AMF), which has been issuing threats to the public.
They were allegedly behind 13 cases — of bombs that exploded or found in the nick of time before they exploded.
Al Ummah was formed by Syed Ahmed Basha and others a year after the Babri Masjid demolition.
According to a senior police officer, its presence came to light after the 1993 bomb blast near the RSS office in Chennai, in which 11 people were killed. Though Imam Ali was not a member of Al Ummah, he had contacts with it and was a key accused in the RSS case.
The next big case was the 1998 Coimbatore bomb blast, in which around 58 people were killed.
Though Ali had jumped jail in 1992, after he was held for making bombs at Thirumogur near Melur, the police caught up with him again in 1995. But Ali again escaped from police custody while being taken to Palayamkottai from a Chennai prison in March 2002. On September 29, 2002, a Special Investigation Team gunned him down along with four others in Bengaluru.
“Ali and four others were buried at Sungam dargah at Nelpettai in Madurai,” an official said.