Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: Who’s Who? Who is Behind the Terrorists? - By Prof Michel Chossudovsky - globalresearch.ca

http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-in-the-islamic-maghreb-whos-whos-who-is-behind-the-terrorists/5319754

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: Who’s Who? Who is Behind the Terrorists?

 
 
Who is behind the terrorist group which attacked the BP -Statoil-Sonatrach In Amenas Gas Field Complex located on the Libyan border in South Eastern Algeria?  (see map below)

The operation was coordinated by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, leader of the Al Qaeda affiliated Islamist al-Mulathameen (Masked) Brigade, or “Those who Sign with Blood.” 

Belmokhtar’s  organization has been involved in the drug trade, smuggling as well kidnapping operations of foreigners in North Africa.  While his whereabouts are known, French intelligence has dubbed Belmokhtar “the uncatchable”.

Belmokhtar took responsibility on behalf of Al Qaeda for the kidnapping of 41 Western hostages including 7 Americans at the BP In Amenas Gas Field Complex.

Belmokhtar, however, was not directly involved in the actual attack. The field commander of the operation was Abdul Rahman al-Nigeri, a veteran jihadist fighter from Niger, who joined Algeria’s Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in 2005. (Albawaba,  January 17, 2013)




The In Amenas kidnapping operation was carried out five days after the conduct of air strikes by France directed against Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) militants in northern Mali.

French special forces and Malian troops regained control of Diabaly and Konna, two small towns North of Mopti.  The town of Diabaly had apparently been taken over a few days earlier by fighters led by one of the leading AQIM commanders Abdelhamid Abou Zeid.

While the terrorist attack and kidnapping directed against the In Amenas Gas plant was described as an act of revenge, it was not in any way improvised, Confirmed by analysts, the operation  had in all likelihood been planned well in advance:
“European and U.S. officials say the raid was almost certainly too elaborate to have been planned in so short a time, although the French campaign could have been one trigger for fighters to launch an assault they had already prepared.”
According to recent reports (January 20, 2012) there are some 80 casualties, including hostages and jihadist fighters. There were several hundred workers at the gas plant, most of whom were Algerian. “Of those rescued, only 107 out of 792 workers were foreign”, according to the Algerian Ministry of Interior. 

The British and French governments laid the blame on the jihadists. 

In the words of Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron:
“Of course people will ask questions about the Algerian response to these events, but I would just say that the responsibility for these deaths lies squarely with the terrorists who launched this vicious and cowardly attack. (Reuters, January 20, 2013).
News reports confirm, however, that a large number of the deaths of both the hostages and the Islamic fighters was the result of the bombing raids led by Algerian forces.

Negotiations with the captors, which could have saved lives, had not been seriously contemplated by either the Algerian or Western governments. The militants had demanded an end to France’s attacks in northern Mali in return for the safety of the hostages. Al Qaeda leader Belmokhtar had stated:
“We are ready to negotiate with the West and the Algerian government provided they stop their bombing of Mali’s Muslims” (Reuters, January 20, 2013)
Within the ranks of the jihadists were mercenaries from a number of Muslim countries including Libya (yet to be confirmed) as well as fighters from Western countries.



  

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Who’s Who? 

There are a number of affiliated groups which are actively involved in northern Mali:
  • Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) led by Abdelmalek Droukdel, “the emir of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb”,
  • Ansar Ed-Dine led by Iyad Ag Ghaly,
  • the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJWA).

The Armed Islamic Group, or Groupe islamique armé (GIA) which was prominent in the 1990s is largely defunct. Its members have joined AQIM.

The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad  (MNLA) is a Tuareg secular nationalist and independence movement.

Historical Background

In September 2006, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) joined forces with Al Qaeda. The GSPC was founded by Hassan Hattab a former GIA commander.

In January 2007,  the group officially changed its name to the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Also in early 2007, the newly formed AQIM established a close relationship with the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).

The commanders of the GSPC had been inspired by the religious teaching of Salafism in Saudi Arabia, which historically played an important role in the training of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

The history of AQIM jihadist commanders is of significance in addressing the broader issue:
  • Who is behind the various Al Qaeda affiliated factions?
  • Who is supporting the terrorists?
  • What political and economic interests are being served?
The Washington based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) traces the origins of AQIM back to the Soviet-Afghan war:
Most of AQIM’s major leaders are believed to have trained in Afghanistan during the 1979-1989 war against the Soviets as part of a group of North African volunteers known as “Afghan Arabs” that returned to the region and radicalized Islamist movements in the years that followed. The group is divided into “katibas” or brigades, which are clustered into different and often independent cells.

The group’s top leader, or emir, since 2004 has been  Abdelmalek Droukdel, also known as Abou Mossab Abdelwadoud, a trained engineer and explosives expert who has fought in Afghanistan and has roots with the GIA in Algeria. It is under Droukdel’s leadership that AQIM declared France as its main target. One of the “most violent and radical” AQIM leaders is Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, according to counterterrorism experts. Abou Zied is linked to several kidnappings and executions of Europeans in the region. (Council on Foreign Relations, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, cfr.org, undated)

What the CFR report fails to mention is that the Islamic jihad in Afghanistan was a CIA initiative, initially launched in 1979 during the Carter administration. It was actively supported by president Ronald Reagan throughout the 1980s.

In 1979 the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA was launched in Afghanistan.  Wahabi missionaries from Saudi Arabia set up the Coranic schools (madrassahs) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Islamic textbooks used in the madrassahs were printed and published in Nebraska. Covert funding was channeled to the Mujahideen with the support of the CIA:
“With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, who wanted to turn the Afghan Jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually, more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.” (Ahmed Rashid, “The Taliban: Exporting Extremism”, Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999).
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), using Pakistan’s military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), played a key role in training the Mujahideen. In turn, the CIA-sponsored guerrilla training was integrated with the teachings of Islam:
In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166,…[which] authorize[d] stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies — a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987… as well as a “ceaseless stream” of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan’s ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels.” (Steve Coll, Washington Post, July 19, 1992)
Mokhtar Belmokhtar, mastermind behind the terrorist attack by the Islamist al-Mulathameen (Masked) Brigade on the In Amenas Gas complex is one of the founding members of AQIM.
 
He was trained and recruited by the CIA in Afghanistan. 
 
Belmokhtar  was a North African volunteers, an  “Afghan Arab” enlisted at age 19 as a Mujahideen to fight within the ranks of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, at a time when the CIA and its Pakistani affiliate –the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)– were actively supporting the jihadists in both recruitment and training.
 
Mokhtar Belmokhtar fought in the Afghan “civil war”.
 
 
 
 
He returned to Algeria in 1993 and joined the GSPC. 
 
Belmokhtar’s history and involvement in Afghanistan suggests that he was a US sponsored “intelligence asset”.

The Role of America’s Allies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) from the outset in 2007 had established a close relationship to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), whose leaders had also been trained and recruited in Afghanistan bu the CIA. The LIFG is supported covertly by the CIA and Britain’s MI6.

The LIFG  was directly supported by NATO during the 2011 war on Libya, “providing weapons, training, special forces and even aircraft to support them in the overthrow of Libya’s government.” (Tony Cartalucci, The Geopolitical Reordering of Africa: US Covert Support to Al Qaeda in Northern Mali, France “Comes to the Rescue”, Global Research, January 2013)

. British SAS Special Forces had been brought into Libya prior to onset of the insurrection, acting as mlitary advisers to the LIFG.
More recently, reports confirm that AQIM has received weapons from the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). LIFG mercenaries have integrated AQIM brigades. According to commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who coordinated the In Amenas kidnapping operation:
“We have been one of the main beneficiaries of the revolutions in the Arab world. As for our benefiting from the (Libyan) weapons, this is a natural thing in these kinds of circumstances.” http://www.hanford.gov/c.cfm/oci/ci_terrorist.cfm?dossier=174
The BP In Amenas plant is located directly on the Libyan border. One suspects that there was a contingent of Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) combatants involved in the operation.

AQIM also has ties to the Al Nusra Front in Syria which is supported covertly by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is indelibly tied into a Western intelligence agenda. It is described  as ” one of the region’s wealthiest, best-armed militant groups”, financed covertly by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

France’s  Canard enchaîné revealed (June 2012) that Qatar (a staunch ally of the United States) has been funding various terrorist entities in Mali including the Salafist Ansar Ed-Dine:
Both the Tuareg rebels of the MNLA (independence and laity), Ansar Ed Dine, AQIM (Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb) and Mujao (Jihad in West Africa) were assisted with dollars from Qatar, according to one report  (The Examiner)

The satirical French paper Canard Enchaîné reported [June 2012] that Qatar has allegedly been funding armed groups in northern Mali made their way into Algerian and west African outlets.

Suspicions that Ansar Ed-Dine, the main pro-shari’ah armed group in the region, has been receiving funding from Qatar has circulated in Mali for several months.

Reports (as yet unconfirmed) that a ‘Qatari’ aircraft landed at Gao, full of weapons, money and drugs, for example, emerged near the beginning of the conflict.

The original report cites a French military intelligence report as indicating that Qatar has provided financial support to all three of the main armed groups in northern Mali: Iyad Ag Ghali’s Ansar Ed-Dine, al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJWA).

The amount of funding given to each of the groups is not mentioned but it mentions repeated reports from the French DGSE to the Defense Ministry have mentioned Qatar’s support for ‘terrorism’ in northern Mali. (emphasis added)
The role of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as an intelligence asset must be carefully assessed. The Islamic insurgency creates conditions which favor the political destabilization of Mali as a nation state. What geopolitical interests have been served?




 Concluding Remarks: “The American Sudan”

In a bitter irony, the kidnapping operation in Southern Algeria and the tragedy resulting from the Algerian led military “rescue” operation provide a humanitarian justification for Western military intervention led by US AFRICOM.  The latter not only pertains to Mali and Algeria. It could also include the broader region extending  across the sub-Saharan Sahelian belt, from Mauritania to the Western border of Sudan.

This process of escalation is part of a US military and strategic “road-map”, a subsequent stage in the militarization of the African continent, “a followup” to the US-NATO 2011 war on Libya.

It is a project of neo-colonial conquest by the US over a vast area.

While France is the former colonial power, intervening on behalf of Washington, the end-game is to eventually exclude France from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. This displacement of France as a colonial power has been ongoing since the war of Indochina in the 1950s.

While the US is prepared in the short-run to share the spoils of war with France, Washington’s ultimate objective is to “redraw the map of the African continent”, and eventually, to transform francophone Africa into an American sphere of influence. The latter would extend across the continent from Mauritania on the Atlantic to the Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.

A similar process of excluding France from francophone Africa has been ongoing since the 1990s in Rwanda, Burundi and the Republic of the Congo.

In turn, French as an official language in francophone Africa is being encroached upon. Today in Rwanda, English is an official language, alongside Kinyarwanda  and French. Starting with the RPF government in 1994, secondary education was offered in either French or English. Since 2009 it is offered solely in English. 

The University since 1994, no longer operates in French. (The president of Rwanda Paul Kagame does not read or speak French). 

In 2009, Rwanda joined the Commonwealth.

What is at stake is a vast territory which during the colonial period included French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa  (See map  left as well as maps below)

Mali during the French period was referred to as Le Soudan  français (the French Sudan).




Ironically, this process of weakening and eventually excluding France from francophone Africa has been carried out with the tacit endorsement of  both (former) president Nicolas Sarkozy and president François Hollande, both of whom are serving US geopolitical interests to the detriment of the French Republic.

The militarization of the African continent is part of the mandate of US Africom.

The longer term goal is to exert geopolitical as well military control over a vast area, which historically has been within France’s sphere of influence.  This area is an rich in oil, natural gas, gold, uranium and strategic minerals. (See R. Teichman, The War on Mali. What you Should Know: An Eldorado of Uranium, Gold, Petroleum, Strategic Minerals …, Global Research, January 15, 2013)
The colonial re-division of Africa decided at the 1884-85 at the Berlin Conference (right). For the maps of French colonial Africa, see below.



 
 

About the author:

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal and Editor of the globalresearch.ca website. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America’s “War on Terrorism”(2005). His most recent book is entitled Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages.

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Bloomberg - India’s Narendra Modi and the Tale of Two Rapes - By Shikha Dalmia

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-17/india-s-narendra-modi-and-the-tale-of-two-rapes.html

India’s Narendra Modi and the Tale of Two Rapes

By Shikha Dalmia Jan 17, 2013 9:12 PM GMT+0530
 
One of the most obscene moments after the death of the gang-rape victim in New Delhi was a tweet by Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat, offering regret and condolences to the dead woman’s family.

Modi, who has quelled restive minorities by allowing attackers to subject women to unspeakable horrors, has done more than any man to numb his prudish country to sexual violence. Yet he was elected to a third term last month and is the presumptive front-runner of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main Hindu opposition party, for prime minister in next year’s national elections.

So long as Indians keep rewarding politicos such as Modi, the country’s collective outrage after the New Delhi case won’t change the culture that makes such atrocities common in India.


The attack on the 23-year-old physiotherapy student was depraved. Five men and a teenager in a private bus are accused of kidnapping, beating, raping and violating her with an iron rod -- and then dumping her and her semi-conscious boyfriend on a highway, where they also allegedly tried to run her over. But as monstrous as this crime was, consider what happened in Gujarat in February 2002, a few months after Modi assumed office.

Organized bands of well-armed Hindus -- some from groups tied to Modi’s party -- fanned across the state seeking revenge against Muslims for allegedly burning a train full of Hindu pilgrims a few weeks earlier. The Hindu rioters systematically sought out and destroyed Muslim homes and businesses, killing more than 1,000 people.

Extreme Violence

Muslim women were singled out. According to many Indian and foreign sources, including a Human Rights Watch account and a report by an international research team called “Threatened Existence: A Feminist Analysis of the Genocide in Gujarat,” women were stripped, gang-raped, often publicly, and in almost all cases then burned or hacked to death.

The reason the violence reached such extremes was that the state police stood back and didn’t intervene to stop the Hindu attacks and even told victims that it couldn’t protect them. As if the bloodletting wasn’t horrific enough, Modi subsequently dismantled the shelters constructed by private organizations for dispossessed Muslims, calling them “child-breeding centers.”

Compared with the New Delhi rape, which has triggered a protest movement in India calling for the castration and execution of the suspects, the Gujarat rapes and pogrom elicited barely a whimper. 

Many Hindus either deny that the horror even occurred or, if they accept it, claim it wasn’t as grisly as news accounts suggest. And if they believe the accounts, they say Muslims had it coming. Fewer than 100 out of the thousands accused -- among them only one state minister and one Bharatiya Janata Party leader -- were convicted, and that was a decade later. Modi himself was exonerated.
Whatever public disgust there was against him has dissipated, given the stellar economic growth that Gujarat has seen on his watch. Business leaders and corporations, from India and overseas, turn a blind eye to Modi’s role in allowing the bloodshed, and praise his economic stewardship. His business backers have already managed to get the U.K. government to reverse its long-standing ban on him and to give him a visa. Now they are trying to persuade the U.S. government to follow suit.

What accounts for the wide gulf in the Indian public response to the single crime in New Delhi and the mass crimes in Gujarat?
On a positive side, attitudes toward women have evolved considerably since the Gujarat atrocity 11 years ago. Indian women’s aspirations and opportunities have increased, especially in big cities, and they are demanding that the governing classes keep pace and create an environment in which they are free to move around safely.

Changed Attitudes

After the New Delhi attack, any politician or even religious guru -- no matter how revered -- who suggested that women need to circumscribe their lives and choices for their own protection was condemned and lampooned, something scarcely imaginable when I was growing up in New Delhi (in a Hindu household) in the 1970s.

But the darker reality is that the young woman’s rape and murder outraged the country’s Hindu urban middle class because it was a random and senseless act that could have just as easily victimized their daughters. 

Not so with attacks on the Muslim women in Gujarat. 

The premeditated and programmatic violence against them meant that the broader Hindu majority was insulated from it. If the New Delhi woman’s fate made every Indian feel more vulnerable, the attack on the Muslim women made Hindus feel more secure.

There are other reasons for India’s apathy toward Modi’s misdeeds. India is a democracy and has its share of human-rights activists and watchdog groups keeping an eye on government brutality. Yet the public at large has little appreciation of the dangers associated with overly muscular government. Indians complain constantly about government dysfunction and corruption. Yet they have little compunction about giving draconian powers to their rulers in the name of security. The upshot, tragically, is that Indians care less about state-fueled rape than when perpetrated by individuals.

The scale of the sexual violence in Gujarat was unprecedented in India. But smaller episodes are a matter of routine. The Indian army has been accused of using rape as a weapon to crush secessionist movements in Kashmir and Manipur. After one particularly heinous case eight years ago, Manipuri women stripped naked and stormed the army headquarters with placards plaintively protesting: “Indian Army Rapes Us.”

Tolerating sexual violence for any purpose erodes the overall stigma against it, opening a moral space where hoodlums can run amok. The lack of national outrage against the mass rapes perpetrated under Modi reduces their true cruelty, breaking down the psychological walls that would at least prevent nonsociopaths from going on a rampage. Hindus who turn a blind eye to the rape of Muslim women can’t ultimately protect their own.

How India can restore moral boundaries is a difficult issue, but it certainly won’t be solved by electing Modi to higher office -- even if he were Adam Smith himself. Protesters shouldn’t just seek justice against the six accused in New Delhi. Modi, too, has much to atone.

(Shikha Dalmia is a contributor to Bloomberg View and a Detroit-based senior analyst at Reason Foundation. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this article: Shikha Dalmia in Detroit at shikhadalmia62@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net







--------------------


Mushawarat condemns the Andhra Pradesh Goverment’s vendetta politics | Mushawarat chief writes to the Union Home Minister on saffron terror

Mushawarat, AIMMM, Delhi
5:16 PM (1 hour ago)



ALL INDIA MUSLIM MAJLIS-E-MUSHAWARAT
[Umbrella body of the Indian Muslim organisations]
D-250, Abul Fazal Enclave, Jamia Nagar
New Delhi-110025  India
Tel.: 011-26946780 Fax: 011-26947346

Mushawarat condemns the Andhra Pradesh Goverment’s vendetta politics

New Delhi, 22 January 2013: Dr. Zafarul-Islam Khan, President of All India Muslim Majlis-e Mushawarat (AIMMM), the umbrella body of Indian Muslim organizations, said here today in a press statement that the revival of an old case and arrest of the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimin leader and Member of Parliament Mr Asaduddin Owaisi is a clear case of vendetta politics resorted to by the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh only because the MIM opted out of the ruling coalition in the state two months ago. Action should be taken against those police and judicial officials who failed their duty in a case pending since 2005 which, prima facie, seems frivolous and driven by the anti-Muslim  bias which has become the hallmark of the Andhra Police which could not restrain itself from firing even at the protesters who came out against the Makkah Masjid blast in May 2007 and later arbitrarily arrested dozens of blameless Muslim youths who were later declared totally innocent by courts. This is the same police force which failed to take any action against VHP leader Togadia  despite a number of FIRs filed against him. He freely spit venom in Hyderabad last month and went away under airport-to-airport security provided by this very force.

AIMMM demands that the A.P. government must stop this petty vendetta politics, release Mr Asaduddin Owaisi and his brother Mr Akbaruddin Owaisi, MLA, on bail and let the courts judge if they are really guilty. As of now, it is the administration which is drastically misusing its powers to silence political dissent.
 [end]


Mushawarat chief writes to the Union Home Minister on saffron terror

New Delhi, 22 January 2013: Dr. Zafarul-Islam Khan, President of All India Muslim Majlis-e Mushawarat (AIMMM), wrote a letter today to Shri Sushil Kumar Shinde, Hon’ble Union Home Minister, congratulating him for his candid statement on the saffron terror. Dr Khan asked Shri Shinde to expedite the probe and judicial proceedings in the saffron terror case. He said that what has been exposed so far is only the tip of the iceberg.  Dr Khan also asked the Home Minister to order a judicial probe into all the terror incidents which took place since the BJP came to power in certain states and later at the Central level in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Only such a high-lelvel unbiased probe will uncover the reality of terrorism in India, he said.
  
Dr Khan further said in his letter, “Those who have been nabbed so far are the expendable lower rung workers who actually plant bombs. It is particularly worrying that persons like Indresh Kumar and Praveen Togadia, whose names appear in the Malegaon and Ajmer blasts chargesheets, have not been even interrogated till date. Outfits like Abhinav Bharat, Sanatan Sanstha, Bajrang Dal, Arya Sena, Sri Ram Sene etc have not been touched. Places like Bhonsla Military School of Nasik and Pune and the Akanksha Resort of Pune have not been probed and the thousands of Hindutva terrorists who received arms and explosives training in these and other camps over many years have not been traced so far, which means that they remain free to undertake their terrorist activities with impunity. It is also strange that BJP-ruled states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka where these terrorists find safe haven, have not been taken to task.”
  
Dr Khan asked the Union Home Minister to seriously detoxify the Police and Intelligence personnel who have been infiltrated by saffron elements who, in turn, facilitate and cover up saffron terror activities.

[end]

Text of the AIMMM President to the Hon’ble Union Home Minister

22 January 2013

Shri Sushil Kumar Shinde
Hon’ble Union Home Minister
Governmt of India
New Delhi

Dear Sir,

Please accept my sincere congratulations for your courage to say publicly what is well-known to those concerned with the security and safety of our country, especially since Martyr Hemant Karkare, the then chief of Maharashtra ATS, exposed the vast secret network of Hindutva terrorists in 2008 while investigating the Malegaon blast of that year.

We hope and urge you that the investigations and court proceedings should be expedited and the real culprits who plan, finance and direct Hindutva terror, are exposed, nabbed and sentenced. Those who have been nabbed so far are the expendable lower rung workers who actually plant bombs. It is particularly worrying that persons like Indresh Kumar and Praveen Togadia, whose names appear in the Malegaon and Ajmer blasts chargesheets, have not been even interrogated till date. Outfits like Abhinav Bharat, Sanatan Sanstha, Bajrang Dal, Arya Sena, Sri Ram Sene etc have not been touched. Places like  Bhonsla Military School of Nasik and Pune and the Akanksha Resort of Pune have not been probed and the thousands of Hindutva terrorists who received arms and explosives training in these and other camps over many years have not been traced so far, which means that they remain free to undertake their terrorist activities with impunity. It is also strange that BJP-ruled states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka where these terrorists find safe haven, have not been taken to task.

Please allow me to say that apart from nabbing these terrorists, your ministry also has the task of detoxifying the Police and Intelligence personnel who have been infiltrated by saffron elements who, in turn, facilitate and cover up saffron terror activities.

It is our studied opinion that what has been exposed of the vast saffron terror network so far is just the tip of the iceberg. We request you to order a judicial probe into all the terror incidents which took place since the BJP came to power in certain states and later at the Central level in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Only such a high-level unbiased probe will uncover the reality of terrorism in India.

I take this opportunity to send you a copy of Godse’s Children – Hindutva terror in India by Subhash Gatade. It is about the saffron terror. I hope you will find time to read it.

Yours sincerely
Dr Zafarul-Islam Khan
President