He knew the Quran by heart, often gave us lessons: Parents

The Indian Express tracked down the Biswases on Friday night, and soon after the newspaper became available on Saturday morning, reporters from print publications and television channels descended on the family’s home in Kaikhali near Dum Dum airport. It is from them that the couple learnt that their son had been arrested.

“We were totally in the dark about our son’s alleged activities, for which he has been arrested…  We are hoping to leave for Bangalore as early as possible, but we fear that his flat will now be out of bounds. Who will accommodate the parents of a man branded a terrorist?” Dr Biswas, a 64-year-old retired assistant engineer of the West Bengal State Electricity Board who now practises as a homoeopathic doctor, told The Sunday Express.

Sources in central police agencies which have been working on the background of Masroor said on Saturday that according to their findings, Masroor was a “self motivated preacher for Islam and apparently had no mentors”.

From an analysis of the tweets allegedly posted by him on @ShamiWitness, investigators have got a preliminary impression that Masroor was “basically doing a copy-paste operation, mostly repeating stuff that had surfaced on several forums of the IS”.

These investigators said that while there was no doubt about the strong Islamic moorings of Masroor, no concrete evidence had emerged so far to link him to jihadi activities.

Sitting in their home north of Kolkata, Masroor’s parents appeared clueless about their son’s online identity — it seemed inconceivable to them that their well-behaved, timid, God-fearing son who liked to confine himself to his home at most times could be an aggressive jihadist propagandist who lauded the IS’s barbaric beheadings in the virtual world. The Internet is largely an alien world to them, the couple said.

“Our son is a devout Muslim,” Dr Biswas said. “He had learnt the Quran Sharif by heart, and would often give me and my wife lessons from the Holy Book. He did not know Arabic; he had learnt the English version of the Quran.”

Masroor never went to a madrasa or religious teacher, Dr Biswas said. “He studied in English-medium schools all through, and was a middling student. He passed his Madhyamik examination from Indira Gandhi School in Kaikhali, and did his Higher Secondary from Kendriya

Vidyalaya near the Dum Dum Ordnance Factory.”

The parents did confirm that their son appeared obsessed with his laptop. “On vacation, he would spend hours on it. At times he would burst out laughing while watching something on his laptop. But he never told us exactly what he was watching.”

Masroor was a shy boy and an introvert, Dr Biswas said. In Bangalore, he intially stayed as a paying guest, sharing his quarters with three or four others. He had moved out later, apparently because he could not reconcile to the fact that his roommates consumed alcohol.

“Food in Bangalore for a Bengali boy was a problem. He was not used to South Indian food. So his mother stayed with him over lengths of time,” Dr Biswas said.

It was only on November 26, in fact, that Masroor’s parents had returned to Kolkata after spending several weeks with him. Masroor, they said, had sat for the CAT, and hoped to do an MBA.

Biman Nagar, the Kaikhali neighbourhood where the Biswases live, is still relatively new, and gets its name from its proximity to the airport, ‘biman-bandar’ in Bengali. Dr Biswas and his wife were one of the early residents. A portion of their three-storey house has been put on rent.
The neighbourhood has a mixed population of Hindus and Muslims. Not being settled for long, its residents don’t know each other very well. Muslims knew Dr Biswas as a homoeopath. The family’s ancestral home is in Baduria in Basirhat, about 80 km away.

“You can check our background with the local police station,” Dr Biswas said. He had apparently got to know the local police after a dispute over erecting a mobile phone tower on his roof — the family’s neighbours had objected, fearing radioactive emissions. The tower was not erected ultimately.