A group of youths from Uttar Pradesh accused of involvement in a bomb blast on an Ujjain-Bhopal passenger train on March 7, including Saifullah Khan who died in an encounter in Lucknow on March 8, swore allegiance in September 2016 to Islamic State (IS) following a pattern seen in other cases where youths have been arrested in India for IS links. Investigation into the train blast has revealed that a group of 10 people gathered on September 13, 2016, at the Kanpur flat of Atif Muzaffar alias Al Kasim, the 22-year-old leader of the IS-inspired group, and swore allegiance to IS. At the meeting, an oath of allegiance to IS was read out and explained by Atif before everyone present took the pledge. This was recorded by Atif on his phone. According to accounts provided to investigators by Mohammed Ghouse Khan, a 55-year-old retired IAF man who was a mentor to the group, the oath was a pledge to abide by instructions of the Amir (leader). After swearing allegiance, the group discussed operations and funding, and Atif announced he had sold a plot of land for Rs 25 lakh to procure weapons for the group. Although the group has not been directly linked to IS, and only labelled an IS-inspired module, the group has followed a pattern seen in recent IS-linked cases in terms of the ‘bayath’ or oath and discussions after the oath is taken. The pledge to the Caliphate is considered a key step to formally place a group or individual under the authority of IS. Recruits are told by handlers that they would die the death of an ignorant person, “Jahiliyyat ki Maut”, if they do not sign or take the ‘bayath’. In January 2016, after the NIA arrested 16 youths from Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Lucknow and other places for attempts to create an IS-affiliate called Junood ul Khalifa fil Hind in India, it was found that most of the youths had sworn allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi on the directions of a handler, Yusuf al Hindi alias Shafi Armar, an Indian suspected to be in Syria. In October 2015, handler Yusuf al Hindi advised Mohammed Azhar Khan alias Ikrama, a 24-year-old from Goharganj in Madhya Pradesh, to take an oath of ‘baiyat’ or ‘bayah’ in support of IS. The handler sent a draft of the oath in Arabic via mail which Ikrama translated into Hindi and sent back to Yusuf after swearing allegiance to Baghdadi. The oath sent by Yusuf al Hindi — who was in contact with over 300 Indian youths via the Internet in 2015-16 — is very similar to the oath administered to the UP group, documents filed by the NIA reveal. After he took the oath, Ikrama and others were assigned specific tasks at a meeting in Lucknow in November 2015. Ikrama and the others were arrested early 2016. In another case, nine persons from Hyderabad were arrested in July 2016 for procuring weapons under the guidance of a yet-to-be-identified IS handler. He communicated with the group in fluent Hindi the bayath, which is similar to the those in the other two cases. In the case of the UP group, an IS-linked handler has not been identified but it is suspected that group leader Atif Muzaffar was in touch with a handler since he recorded bayaths of the group, uploaded images of the IED that exploded on the Ujjain train and other incidents to a remote handler.
