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| Masood Azhar's cell days under scanner | | | 21 Aug, JAMMU: The six years that Masood Azhar, founder of the Jaish-e-Mohammad terror group, spent in a Jammu and Kashmir prison will be re-looked at by intelligence agencies in an attempt to understand the mind of the man, now said to be the mastermind of the foiled plot of blowing up commercial airlines over the Atlantic.
"No request has been received from the London police, but we are trying to re-read the mind of the man that Masood Azhar was," an official said of the exercise being undertaken after the names of Azhar and Omar Sheikh Sayeed cropped up in the terror plot uncovered in Britain.
The intelligence agencies routinely study the pattern of new acts of terror across the globe. They have conducted in-depth studies on the major terror attacks in the 21st century - 9/11 in the US, March 11, 2004, in Madrid and July 7, 2005, in London.
"With Al Qaeda having sneaked into Jammu and Kashmir, these studies have become more important," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Azhar had been incarcerated in Kot Bhalwal jail on the outskirts of Jammu after his arrest by the Indian Army in 1994. He was freed on December 31, 1999, in exchange for 155 passengers of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 that was hijacked to Kandahar in Afghanistan while flying from Kathmandu to Delhi.
Along with Azhar, Omar Sheikh Sayeed, also also Mushtaq Zargar had been freed from Srinagar's Central Jail. The trio were taken to Kandahar by then Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh and handed over to Afghanistan's then ruling Taliban in exchange for the Indian passengers.
Azhar, who entered Jammu and Kashmir as an ideologue of Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA), saw the group demand his release in the very first year after his arrest.
The HUA men picked up two British nationals from Aroo in Pahalgam in June 1994, but they were set free without anyone being released in exchange.
It was the local pressure against the abductions that made the HUA free the Britons - one of them the son of a former British representative of Financial Times in India.
In July 1995, HUA under the newly-acquired name of Al-Faran, abducted and later executed five foreigners, two Britons, an American, a German and a Norwegian, when their demand for the release of Masood Azhar was not met.
The wives and relatives of the abducted foreigners had made a personal appeal to Masood Azhar to intervene and get their kin freed. But that proved to be of no use.
The US had banned HUA in 1996 because of the killing of the American, Donald Hutchings, and the other four foreigners. Later, HUA renamed itself as Harkat-ul-Mujahadeen.
After being freed in 1999, Azhar went to Pakistan from Kandahar. He formed the Jaish-e-Mohammad that introduced the cult of suicide bombings and played a critical role in the December 13, 2001 terrorist assault on the Indian Parliament.
"The new investigation would focus on interrogating afresh some of the men with whom Azhar shared the barracks in Kot Bhalwal jail and the kind of conversations he had with them," the official said.
"The idea is to study how far he can go to influence the terror world, and what are his weaknesses.
"It is essentially a re-profiling of the man, who is as dangerous as any other terrorist mastermind. The men who indoctrinate and incite violence in the name of religion are the real terrorists, and far more lethal than those wielding guns and bombs. They are the real culprits," the official added. |
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