BENGALURU: The National Investigation Agency, which is probing the five bomb blasts that took place in court complexes in South India, including Mysuru, says the accused targeted the courts to avenge the hanging of 1993 Mumbai blasts case convict Yakub Memon and the encounter of Imam Ali in Bengaluru in 2002.
The chargesheet filed before the special court — a copy of which is available with The New Indian Express — indicates that the outfit named ‘Base Movement’ carried out the attacks. The outfit was named so after al-Qaeda, which was ‘The Base’. The outfit used the photo of Osama Bin Laden on all its letters and videos with ‘Al Qaeda’ written in Arabic and English.
NIA has named Ninar Abbas Ali, who worked as a painter and ran an Islamic library named Darul Islam; Samsun Karim Raja, who ran Ahad Broilers chicken shop at Madurai and also assisted his father in SR Printers; and S Dawood Sulaiman, an engineering student having knowledge of computers and English, in its chargesheet. The outfit believed that Muslims accused of various crimes and lodged in jails were being ill-treated and the courts were giving them a raw deal.
Also, it believed that they were also biased against the Muslim accused, the chargesheet says. Abbas Ali prepared the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) and is the main conspirator who had learnt how to make a bomb from one of his earlier associates, Abu Bakar Siddique. Abbas Ali assigned Samsun Karim Raja, who conducted a recce of the Mysuru court complex almost two weeks before the blast. After the recce, Samsun Karim Raja showed the video which he had shot, to Abbas Ali who then tasked Dawood to blast the IED.
Abbas Ali prepared the IED in the house of Mohammed Ayub using the same type of explosive material. Dawood planted the bomb in Mysuru court complex. On the same day, Mohammed Ayub sent messages to a few government officials in the state and also uploaded messages on Facebook.
Bigger Conspiracy
The chargesheet said the explosion at the Mysuru court premises was not a standalone act, but was part of a bigger conspiracy. After starting the operations in January 2015, on the directions of Abbas Ali, the accused, in order to make their presence felt, started sending letters of threat to different jails in Tamil Nadu and senior government functionaries and also opposed the visit of then French President Francois Hollande due to the republishing of a cartoon derogatory to Islam by a Paris-based magazine Charlie Hebdo in a regional newspaper in Tamil Nadu. The newspaper was threatened in January 2015 that they would carry out Charlie Hebdo-style attacks. Police are yet to frame charges against Mohammed Ayub who worked at Sound Good Hearing Care in Madurai, and S Shamsudheen who worked at MS Fish Mart in Madurai.