Terror arrests: Karnataka men innocent, kin say

At a hurriedly arranged press meet after special agencies detained their men, families of software engineer Mohammed Afsal, 34, and Syed Mujahid Hussain, 35, termed the duo's arrest illegal, as police did not follow any rules.
Visibly shaken by the development, the families confidently asserted that their boys would emerge victorious in the legal fight.
Bushra Mohammed Afsal, wife of Md Afsal, who was arrested from his residence in Saraipalya, near Hegdenagar, northeast Bengaluru, said around 35 police officials, including a few women personnel, knocked on their door around 3am. A project manager with a firm in Whitefield, Afsal lived with his wife and four-year-old daughter. “Saying they were special police, the team surrounded us and asked Afsal where the weapons were.One of them held Afsal at gunpoint and ordered him to hand over all documents relating to ISIS,“ she said.
Police locked up Bushra in a room and started questioning Afsal in another room. “ After 50 minutes, they left the house with my husband,“ she said, adding, “I'm sure my husband is innocent. We shall fight the case in a court of law.“
Asked whether Afsal knew Maulana Anzar Shah, whom Delhi police had arrested recently for alleged links with ISIS, she replied in the affirmative, but said she did not know of any disruptive activity the duo was involved in. She also claimed ignorance about Afsal's after-office-hour activities.
HE IS ALLAH'S GIFT
Syed Hussain, 84, father of ISIS suspect Syed Mujahid Hussain, who was arrested from Tumakuru, came all the way to Bengaluru to address the media. “Allah blessed me by sending Mujahid as my son. I know he is innocent. Police seized many documents, including our passports which we had got done this year to visit Mecca and Medina,“ he said, adding, “He runs a grocery shop and spends most of his time there. Then he comes home and spends time with the family. Tell me, how can he become a terrorist?“
HYDRA-HEADED TERROR IN KARNATAKA
SIMI CASE FALLS FLAT 2008:
17 persons were arrested for being part of what police said was a sleeper cell of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India.The arrests were made from Honnalli, Hubballi, Dharwad, Davanagere, Belagavi, Hyderabad and Madhya Pradesh. The 17 arrested included three doctors, one final-year MBBS student and two engineers, and were charged with waging war against the country, sedition and manufacture and possession of a huge amount of explosives.Jihadi literature recovered from them was cited as prime evidence. Last year, a Hubballi court acquitted all 17, saying the prosecution had failed to prove their case.
TARGET VIPS 2012:
A DRDO research fellow and journalist were among 11 men, all in their twenties, arrested by Karnataka police for alleged links with global terror outfits. Six were arrested from Bengaluru and five from Hubballi. Police claimed the youth had links with Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Jihadul-Islami and plotted to kill MPs and MLAs from the state, a businessman and two journalists from Bengaluru. The number of arrested swelled to 15 over the next two months. Within six months, two suspects, including the journalist, were discharged after the NIA said there was no prosecutable evidence against them. The research fellow was later granted bail and no case pressed against him. Trial is under way against the other accused.
BLAST MASTERS
January 2015: Three suspected Indian Mujahideen operatives were picked up by Bengalu operatives were picked up by Bengaluru police for supplying explosive material for several blasts, triggered across the country since 2010. A homoeopath doctor and an MBA student were arrested from a flat in Cox Town in Bengaluru, while a scrap dealer was picked up from Bhatkal.The blasts in which explosives provided by them were used include the German bakery in Pune (2010) and Dilkushnagar blast in Hyderabad (2013). The trial is under way.
THE ROAD TO JIHAD
2015: Five youths from Karnataka were believed to have gone to join the IS in West Asia in 2013.Three were suspected to be dead. Faiz Masood, 28, was a resident of Cooke Town and had BBM degree from Christ College in Bengaluru. Umar Subhan, 29, was said to be a resident of Shivajinagar, Bengaluru. Bhatkal resident Sultan Abdul Kadir Armar, 39, was killed on the SyrianTurkish border, in March 2015. Armar was on the police radar after the NIA arrested Yasin Bhatkal.Dubai police detained Bhatkal man Adnan Hasan Damudi, 33, allegedly a former SIMI member from Karnataka, on suspicion of being an online recruiter for IS. The details of the fifth IS recruit from Karnataka was never known.
TWITTER TROUBLE
2014: Mehdi Masroor Biswas, 25, suspected handler of the pro Islamic State Twitter handler, was arrested on December 14, 2014. A manager with an MNC, Mehdi was accused of carrying out propaganda in support of IS, and had regularly interacted with other IS sympathizers on Twitter and other social networks. He supported the terrorist group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.Biswas, in an attempt to hide his activity, used several fake email addresses from January 2013 to December 2014. Police said further evidence is being gathered to link Biswas to the terrorist group. The chargesheet, drawn up in May 2015, ran into 36,786 pages. More than 1,24,000 tweets were analyzed by the CCB police.
MARKETING ISIS
Dec 2015: Mohammed Sirazuddin, 30, from Gulbarga district, was arrested in Jaipur for allegedly urging local youth to join IS. Sirazuddin was a marketing manager with petroleum major Indian Oil Corporation. The arrest was made by Rajasthan Anti-Terrorist Squad.Sirazuddin allegedly used social media platforms to call upon youth to join the terror group. The social networking accounts he used to spread propaganda of the terrorist group were blocked a few times, as a warning.However, he ignored these warnings and continued to run them under a different name and was subsequently arrested.
WHO ARE THEY?
Mohammed Afsal
Born in Bengaluru, Mohammed Afsal, 34, completed his diploma in mechanical engineering in 2003 and joined some private companies during the initial days. Around 2007, Afzal joined an automobile manufacturing unit as a quality engineer, and then moved to a Whitefield software company in 2009 as junior engineer. He was recently promoted as project manager. His father-in-law Abdul Khader, a retired public prosecutor, said Afsal is a not man who can betray his motherland. “This is unfortunate,“ he said.
Syed Mujahid Hussain
Tumakuru resident Syed Mujahid Hussain, 35, was fascinated about his religion and was actively involved with organizations like the Karnataka Forum for Dignity and SGP. He used to organize classes for youngsters in mosques in Tumakuru. Unlike the other Friday detainees, he was not highly qualified. He had failed the SSLC exam. His father Syed Husain Sahib is a retired deputy tahsildar and his mother, Savilla Khanum, a retired teacher. The family ran a grocery shop for a livelihood, which Mujahid's father opened for him since his academic record was poor. Mujahid is married and has two sons and three daughters. He was allegedly close to Maulana Anzar Shah Qasmi, who was arrested recently, and visited him often.
Najmul Huda
The family of Najmul Huda, alias Majnu, 26, is rom Bihar and settled down in Dakshina Kannada over 25 years ago. Najmul's father Saiful Huda is a moulvi (cleric) in a masjid and his mother is a homemaker. Najmul had completed his diploma in engineering at The Karnataka (Government) Polytechnic before gaining a seat in RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru, in 2011, to study chemical engineering. After joining the third semester in 2011, he failed in several subjects and left the college. He returned in 2014 and paid the fees to finish the course, but stopped coming to college after a ew days. College officials said as he came through lateral entry, he didn't make many friends and didn't interact with other students too much either. They said his academic performance was below average.
Sohail Ahmed
Sohail Ahmed, 31, a preacher in a madrasa, lives n a small dwelling in a narrow lane of Cottonpet, central Bengaluru. His mother Naziya asserts that her son is innocent and will return home soon.The preacher, according to his family, has had no specialized education and was very attached to his relatives: Sohail was, in fact, picked up from his grandfather's house in JJ Nagar.