A few kilometres away from the CRPF’s Group Centre at Rampur, which was hit by the Laskhar-e-Toiba on New Year night, few are surprised at the involvement of local youth Mohd Sharif in the attack, including his father Ayub Khan. Suffering from cancer, Khan says he repents the day he named his eldest son Sharif, meaning a gentleman. His four other sons are unemployed. Sharif has two sons, including one who is physically challenged. The officials investigating the case believe Sharif was with the Lashkar for years, as a “dormant” terror module, and that it was he who came up with the idea of targeting the CRPF camp. He allegedly received training to manufacture explosives at Kotli (Pakistan) in 2001-02. Sharif’s two relatives, Gulab Khan (Baheri, Bareilly) and Jangbahadur alias Baba (Kamru, Rampur), are also in jail in the same case. A village almost completely populated by Muslims, Badanpuri is apprehensive of the taint Sharif’s arrest will bring to it. “If any such incident takes place now, police would start suspecting villagers,” says Rais Ahmed, who runs a PCO booth in the village. While Sharif’s mother Jebu Nishan finds it difficult to believe her son is a “terrorist”, Khan says he has no sympathy for him and would not move court seeking bail. “He had already disconnected himself from us. Being a cancer patient, I have limited days. I am worried about the rest of my family members,” he says. Khan says he knew his son had changed when he left for Azamgarh “perhaps in the year 1988” and married a girl of his choice against the family’s wishes. About 18 years’ old at the time, Sharif stayed for only a few days in his village after coming back from Azamgarh and then left for the Gulf. This raised quite a few eyebrows in Badanpuri as nobody believed Sharif had the money to make the journey. Khan mentions one “Maulana Jakaria” who used to teach him and took him to Azamgarh. Villagers talk of the maulana arranging money for Sharif’s travel.“It was costly then to travel to the Gulf in search of jobs. One needed at least Rs 70,000. Sharif’s financial position was never such,” a villager said. The police haven’t been able to locate Maulana Jakaria so far, and many among them believe he may be the same person as Jakiur Rehman, the operational commander of the Lashkar. With allegations of Sharif’s Lashkar links doing the rounds, villagers say he always used to the odd one out in Badanpuri. “He used to visit the village only once in two-three years. He never interacted with the villagers during his stay. We believed he had settled in Saudi Arabia,” says former village chief Liyakat Ali. Investigators say Sharif actually settled in Nepal about four years back, and his wife and two sons now live there. “He had received money from the LeT and started a small factory manufacturing soles of shoes at Bhairavan in Nepal,” a source in the police said. “He got Rs 12 lakh to do a recce of the CRPF campus,” says a police officer who interrogated him.
