KOZHIKODE: In a major development, C A M Basheer, former Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) national president and one of the country’s most wanted terrorists, was detained in Canada, where he has been living in disguise for years.
A native of Aluva who fled the country in 1992, Basheer was intercepted while trying to fly out of Canada, reports say.
Basheer is an accused in the Mulund blast case that claimed 11 lives at the railway station in the Mumbai suburb in 2003. A red corner notice was issued against him in the case.
According to reports, Mumbai police have started the process for extraditing Chenapparambil Muhammad Basheer. They have approached a Mumbai court seeking permission to collect blood samples from Basheer’s relatives in Aluva to conduct a DNA test to establish his identity. The court has asked Basheer’s sister to cooperate with the investigation.
A graduate in aeronautical engineering, Basheer worked at the New Delhi airport for a short period. He was the national president of the SIMI in the late 1980s. His name had cropped up during the investigation into the activities of the Indian Mujahideen in 2009.
‘Basheer believed to be working closely with ISI’
Intelligence agencies believe that Basheer was coordinating the activities of different terror modules in India while staying abroad.
Basheer’s presence was confirmed in the Gulf where he was operating under the distance education centre of a university in Kerala. But he escaped before the agencies could catch him. Indian agencies knew that Basheer had obtained a fake passport and was shuttling between Pakistan and Canada. It is believed that he was working in close association with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and that he took active interest in recruiting youth from India for terror training under various outfits, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Basheer had intervened when there was difference of opinion between two factions of SIMI after the outfit was banned in 2001. He even sent an emissary to India to sort out the issues, but the mission failed and the faction led by Safdar Nagori went ahead with its aggressive plans. Saquib Nachan, the then general secretary of SIMI, was another accused in the Mulund blast case. He was released in 2017 after serving 10 years in jail.