Terror’s full circle: Jaish founder had told India how he went to London to preach

According to his statements to Indian investigators, Azhar travelled to Birmingham, Leicestershire and other UK towns—the same towns under the scanner now—delivering sermons and meeting young Muslims, largely second-generation Pakistanis. His visit was organized by one Mufti Ismail, an Indian-origin Gujarati Muslim. It was during his UK visit, sources said, that Azhar was introduced to a “passport forgerer,” who prepared a fake Portuguese passport for him, the one that he used to enter India two years later.

In a coincidence that’s now telling, the same year Azhar was in the UK, one Syed Omar Sheikh had enrolled himself in the London School of Economics. Seven years later, both walked free in Kandahar. Sheikh is today charged with the kidnapping and murder of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Azhar’s interrogation reports reveal that he was an avid BBC listener, spoke frequently about his growing support in Britain, especially among the youth. For a cleric who is the product of Karachi’s Binori Mosque, the same place from where Taliban’s Mullah Omar is said to have graduated, 38-year-old Azhar saw himself as a rising ideologue who commanded respect in the expanding pan-Islamic space.

Having joined the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), he was selected to enter Kashmir and strengthen the synergy between Harkat-ul- Ansar and HUM, two groups that went on to merge. Azhar landed in Delhi on a Portuguese passport, cleared Immigration saying he was of Gujarati origin, visited Deoband and then flew to Srinagar where he was finally caught only to be released five years later.

Jaish, which he formed after his release, has been carefully structured by Azhar to ensure that all top positions are filled by only family members. Sources say this is, perhaps, the only jehadi outfit that is dominated by one family. For this reason, Rashid Rauf’s links to the family add credence to the information that he was a Jaish member.

It was confirmed in Azhar’s interrogations that his father is Hafiz Allah Buksh, who was a government school teacher with six sons. Azhar was the sixth whom he decided to hand over to a friend Mufti Sayeed who taught at the Jamia Milia in Binori Mosque.

Azhar’s brother and one of the IC-814 hijackers, Ibrahim Athar, is in charge of India-specific operations while the other brother, Abdul Rauf, is entrusted with the task of liaising with other groups and planning operations against the West. The trio command all authority in JeM. According to British investigators, the sister of Rashid Rauf’s wife is married to one of Azhar’s brothers, Tahir Masood.

The ISI in Pakistan, sources say, has allowed Azhar to have his way unlike the Lashkar-e-Toiba (referred in Jehadi circles as the “Sarkari Tanzeem”) on which it has a tight leash. Intelligence sources say Jaish has acquired a new building in Bahawalpur to house its headquarters.

As it turns out, all siblings are now together under the Jaish roof. It was brother Athar, who orchestrated the IC-814 hijack using the connections Azhar had developed with Mullah Omar and the Taliban owing to old links through the mosque.

HuM cadres, in fact, trained with Taliban and Al Qaeda members. The camps at Khost and Rishkor (outskirts of Kabul which was a key target for Allied forces) largely had HuM cadre. Athar was the one who is said to have drawn the lottery among the hijackers to carry the weapons into the plane at Kathmandu. The family bonding, sources say, is so strong that Azhar accepted a split in the Jaish in 2002-03 allowing Abdul Jabbar Ahmed, a key member but not a part of the Azhar clan, to quit and float his own Khuddam-ul-Islam.

Although officially banned by both the US and Pakistan post-9/11, ISI is said to be supporting Azhar even when Jaish member Mohammed Jamil was identified among those who plotted the attack against Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Jaish, of course, disowned Jamil. Among all terror groups operating against India, sources say, Jaish has the strongest international network.

It is linked with Al Qaeda, groups in Afghanistan and Somalia besides a growing support from second and third generation Pakistani youth in Europe. In the communication retrieved from two youths Mohammed Sohail Afzal and Mohammed Zubair who were caught crossing into India from Bangladesh, it was noticed that photographs of Osama bin Laden and other key international terrorists were displayed prominently in the communiques.