With the arrest of four persons with suspected IS links from Manglour in Uttarakhand, Delhi Police on Wednesday claimed to have unearthed a terror plot to target the ongoing Ardh Kumbh Mela at Haridwar, particularly trains heading there and some strategic locations in the national Capital.
“The suspects, identified as Akhlaq ur-Rehman, Mohammed Osama, Mohammed Azim Shah and Mehroz were arrested from Manglour town in Uttarakhand’s Haridwar district on Tuesday and produced in a Delhi court on Wednesday which sent them to 15 days’ police custody,” Special Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Arvind Deep said.
A highly-placed source told Millennium Post that Akhlaq, who was studying diploma in engineering got influenced towards the IS via social networking website — Facebook on which he was an active participant. Akhlaq also used to read articles in Dabiq magazine. Further, he got in touch with Shafi Armar, chief of Ansar-ul-Tawhid (AuT), the Indian wing of IS who radicalised him and three others — Osama, Azim and Mehroz. “The agencies are yet to retrieve the accounts used by these four operative and AuT Chief,” the source added.
All the four suspects ganged up and used YouTube and other sites to learn the techniques of making bombs. Recently, they were making a matchstick smoke bomb that lets out a slower burning explosion with a bigger flaming effect. They have made more than dozens of match smoke bombs and the explosive was arranged from Chhattisgarh, source added.
“The four suspects were tracked down with inputs from a Central intelligence agency. They had planned to carry out terror attacks at the Ardh Kumbh mela, trains heading towards Haridwar passing through Roorkie and some strategic locations in Delhi,” Deep said.
“After getting in touch with Armar, they were planning to undergo ‘special Taliban training’ from the camps in Afghanistan. All of them wanted to achieve a degree of a full-fledged jihadi as currently they are only following the ideologies of the IS,” the source added.
The AUT was started a year ago by Sultan Armar. However, with conflicting reports of his death being posted on the IS media, the outfit is said to be handled now by his brother Shafi Armar.
Sources further added that the intelligence agencies have at least 300 Indian youth under the scanner from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Kerala who have been recruited into the Tehrik-e-Taliban, AUT and the IS.