Surat, August 1
The police and intelligence sleuths are searching for the possible roots of Haroon Rashid Aswat, the alleged London bombing mastermind, at a village in this south Gujarat district.They are also looking into whether he had visited here some three years ago to network with Izzu Sheikh, an accused in the 1993 serial blasts, arrested by the Gujarat police in Mumbai recently, and other suspects. Police sources informed today that the Aswat family had migrated from Lajpor village, under Kamrej taluka, bordering Navsari, to East Africa and then to Zambia from where Aswat was arrested recently.
The family was among those who migrated from
the territory of the erstwhile Nawab of Sachin. These migrants, mostly converts from the Kasbati Patel community, had gone to Africa for sugarcane farming, copper and diamond mining.
Earlier, the Pakistan police had arrested Aswat in Sargodha, near Islamabad, along with explosives, cash and a British passport.
Aswat, who last week confessed to being a former bodyguard of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, was also reported to have once travelled on an Air-India flight to set up a terror training camp at Oregon,
USA. During and after the Idi Amin regime in Uganda, many of the Gujarati Patel Muslims left Africa to settle down in the UK in the 1970s. Aswat was born at Batley but had been active in Dewsbury near Lancashire which had the biggest concentration of migrant Patel Muslims.
Post-7/7, the London police had traced the bombing accused to Dewsbury, the international headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat, a militant organisation. Since many of south Gujarat mosques followed their Deoband school, the migrants continued to maintain connections back home.
Muhammed Sadiq Khan, one of the July 7 London suicide bombers and a Pakistani, had married into a family that had also migrated from the neighbouring Navsari district in the 1950s. He belonged to Beeston and had divorced his wife, daughter of a well-known British teacher, Farida Patel, who was decorated by the Queen. The district officials were also looking into Khan’s other possible connections in India.
Intelligence sleuths are probing reports that Aswat was related to Muhammed Aswat Nallabhai, a Briton killed in the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat while returning from Ajmer to south Gujarat along with two other British brothers, Saeed and Shakil Dawood.
The families of the two brothers had later sued the state government, including Chief Minister Narendra Modi, demanding a compensation of Rs 20 crore. The case was in progress at a court in Himmatnagar of Sabarkantha district.
Another relative of Aswat, Ahmed Deedat, had also migrated to South Africa to set up a network engaged in the conversion of Christian African tribesmen to Islam.
Deedat, a member of the Ahl-e-Hadith, another militant Islamic organisation,
and one of the tallest intellectuals in the Maulana Abu Ala Maududi-led Jamiat-e-Islami, was also close to the Wahhabi-Saudi establishment.
Izzu Sheikh, recently arrested by Valsad SP Abhaysinh Chudasma from Mumbai, was a former Congress leader from Umargam. At the time of the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, he was Sarpanch of Bhitad village and had been accused of ensuring safe landing on the coasts at Umargam of RDX used in the explosions.
His arrest was made after another blast accused, Mammumiyan Punjumiyan, spilled the beans after his extradition from Dubai. Both of them were now lodged in a Porbandar jail. Another of his accomplices, Muhammed Kolia, who was reported to be working with Aswat, had fled to London via Pakistan, and was still at large, the sources added.
— UNI
