Bus hijacked, torched in Kerala in bid to free Islamic extremist

This is Kerala’s first case of an armed hijack. The operation was almost the stuff of a B-grade movie, but the hijackers armed with guns and knives had shooed out the bus crew and the passengers before dousing the vehicle with petrol and setting it aflame.

The police believe the provocation was reports saying that Madani, whose pleas to transfer his case out of Tamil Nadu and for bail had been turned down, was hurt in a fight involving the jail officials and him last fortnight. Madani and his political outfit, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), a reincarnation of the banned Islamic Sevak Sangh, have all along been accusing the Jayalalithaa Government of foisting the case on him in collusion with the then NDA Government. Madani had lost a leg when RSS activists hurled a bomb at him 13 years ago.

The police are wary. ‘‘We are looking for leads, and are questioning certain people. It needs a thorough probe, I can’t say anything on record’’ says S Padmakumar, DIG of police. Home department sources, however, say the intelligence agencies are at work already, on the wider threat possibilities from the incident.

The five hijackers had got into the bus as passengers at Ernakulam, at about 10 PM. As soon as it moved out of the bus station, three of them walked up to to the driver, held back his neck and pulled out handguns. The other two pressed knives on the bus conductor’s back. They raised slogans demanding Madani’s immediate release, and reportedly kept shouting that more of Tamil Nadu government buses will be torched and bombed until that happened.

The 36 passengers were asked to keep quiet and switch off their mobile phones while the driver was forced to divert to the abandoned factory compound. The passengers were told to get off and run, before the hijackers torched the vehicle.

Madani had first made headlines after he founded the highly radical ISS in 1990. This outfit soon came to be seen as a potent pan-Islamic outfit parodying the RSS structure, and invited an official ban. Madani liquidated the ISS and founded a new one, the PDP, using the pro-Dalit and pro-minorities space.

The PDP, along with the other Kerala extremist outfit, National Development Front (NDF), managed to dig into many of the state’s Muslim pockets, largely feeding on the erosion from Muslim League ranks.

All major political parties in Kerala, other than the BJP, had been supporting the demand for granting Madani bail and for ensuring him medicare. Over a 100 out of the 142 MLAs in the Kerala Assembly had signed a joint petition to the president to this effect, when APJ Abdul Kalam visited the state recently. Chief Minister Oommen Chandy had claimed to have taken up the issue with Jayalalithaa.