Dark days for Indian Mujahideen

Tehseen Akhtar is the son of a chemist in rural Bihar (Samastipur). He is also a commander (and chief of India operations) in the Indian Mujahideen (IM) aka Bhatkal Brothers Corporation (BBC), led by Yasin, Iqbal and Riyaz Bhatkal who originate from the Bhatkal town in Karnataka.

Yasin was recently arrested, Iqbal and Riyaz are head-quartered in a (not so friendly) neighboring country.

While the chances of disrupting the general elections was always high, Tehsin’s arrest will (perhaps) reduce the threat to limb, life and liberty. Or it may not. Recruitment into IM (especially from Azamgarh, UP) is reportedly strong, however most members are opting for Afghanistan where the Taliban senses victory. After that it is probably Kashmir, though Syria and Caucasus may be considered equally promising.

…..
The arrest of a 23-year-old expert bomb-maker named Tehseen Akhtar has allegedly left the terror group Indian Mujahideen without a head in India.

Hunted
by the police for months, Tehseen was arrested early this morning from a
village called Panitanki, near the border with Nepal.

The Delhi
police called Tehseen a big catch who had not just planned several
terror attacks, including the blasts targeting Narendra Modi’s rally in
Patna in October, but also helped set up an arms factory in the capital.

Tehseen
had allegedly been running the Indian Mujahideen in India since the
group’s co-founder Yasin Bhatkal was arrested last year, also near the
India-Nepal border.

Tehseen
is suspected to have a played a role in the 2010 bombing in Varanasi, a
cooker bomb blast outside the Jama Masjid in Delhi last year, the 2011
serial blasts in Mumbai, the 2012 low intensity blasts in Pune and the
twin bombings in Hyderabad last year. Almost 45 people were killed in
these attacks and over 200 were injured.

The tech savvy operative, who frequented cyber cafes, had allegedly been tasked with recruiting young men for terror in Bihar.

Three
top Indian Mujahideen operatives – the Bhatkal brothers, Riyaz and
Iqbal – and Amir Reza Khan are said to be in Pakistan. The Indian
Mujahideen was allegedly founded by Riyaz, Iqbal and Yasin, all of whom
belong to the Bhatkal town in Karnataka.

regards

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Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin. View all posts by Brown Pundits Archive