"The group is said to have bases in Tamil Nadu and there is a visible increase in its activities in the recent past. There were reports that LTTE operated as many as 25 training camps in Tamil Nadu. Periyar town served as a source of the group’s uniforms while Tuticorin provided a sanctuary to smugglers and a hospital in Tiruchi provided medical facilities to the wounded ’Tigers’. Thanjavur was their communication base and Nagapattinam was the hub of professional smugglers who ferried arms and ammunitions from India to Jaffna in Sri Lanka," the paper were qourted well known defence analyst B. Raman's previous paper.
Even they have been reavels few Islamic Terrorism Leaders have been visted in Sri Lanka during the past."Their links with Sri Lanka became evident when Abu Hamsa visited Sri Lanka couple of times,"the paper reveals.
"Lax legal and security environment facilitate the movement of terrorists in south Indian states provide a convenient route for them to move towards their destinations via sea, be it in Maldives or Sri Lanka or Pakistan or Bangladesh," the paper added.
"This poses a serious threat to a region which houses country’s major nuclear power plants, space installations, science centres and information technology hubs," it also warned.
Here full text of the paper,
It's time to take terror threat in South India seriously
by: Anjali Sharma
Recent terrorist attacks in India show that terrorist groups and their network of associates and supporters are not confined to any single geographical location but across the country. Cities and towns in several States are now in the terror trajectory. Most worrisome is the emergence of south India as the favourite hunting ground for terror networks as the Maldives blast, the increased presence of Tamil terrorists and the rising number of extremist groups in Andhra Pradesh,Karnataka and Kerala indicate.
Southern India’s brush with terrorism is not exactly recent. The 1992 Babri Masjid demolition witnessed the birth several small radical organisations in different parts of south, most noticeable and powerful among them being Al Umma. The group quietly mobilised the Muslim youth to carry out bomb explosions on February 14, 1998 in Coimbatore.
Even as al Umma came into public focus, Abu Hamsa alias Abdul Bari, an Indian Muslim in Saudi Arabia with links to Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) and Abu Omar, a Pak citizen, set up Muslim Defence Force in Coimbatore.. The group held its first clandestine meeting in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, in which they planned country-wide activities. As Abu Hamsa became one of the most wanted terrorists after the explosions in Andhra Pradesh, he floated another organization "New Vision" with the help of his connections in Tamil Nadu to propagate Islam amongst the so-called backward classes of the Hindu community and recruit them for training in jihad in Gulf. It was also decided to establish hide-outs for jihadi terrorists visiting Tamil Nadu. Their links with Sri Lanka became evident when Abu Hamsa visited Sri Lanka couple of times.
Another major terrorist group which has been active in south India since early 90s is Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT). The group has always listed the `liberation of Hyderabad` high on their agenda. This objective, enunciated on numerous occasions, has pushed the group to establish networks in south India, which came to the fore recently when LeT trained terrorists carried out blasts on September 29 in Male, the capital of Maldives, a tourist destination and smallest but the most prosperous country of South Asia.
According to the Maldives police, the Islamist cell that carried out the attack had connections with LeT operatives in India. The terrorists had first traveled to Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala before leaving for Pakistan to be trained in explosives and other terror activities in the training camps of LeT.. The police said an ultra-right group Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis is believed to be behind the bombing of the Sultan Park, Male in which about 12 foreign tourists were injured. The key figures responsible for planning the Sultan Park bombing was Saeed Ahmad and Moosa Inas said to have links with a Faislabad seminary Jamia Salafiya Islamia that has hosted dozens of religious students from Maldives. It is the same seminary that has trained several key LeT leaders.
There have been quite a few indications of Kerala’s links with terror. The proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) controlled as many as 12 front organizations in Kerala. The prominent among them are National Democratic Front and Islamic Youth Centre both with sizeable presence among the Muslim youth of Mallapuram and Kozhikode districts in North Kerala. As per police reports, SIMI was operating under the cover of religious study centres, rural development and research centres. It is also reported to have established a women’s wing in Kerala. This means further penetration of the Indian territory by terrorists. In April 2005, for instance, Asif Ibrahim of Maldives told the police that he had been tasked to set up a support unit for a new Maldives based terror group Jamaat-ul-Muslimeen in Thiruvananthapuram. These groups find it easier to procure explosives in India than Maldives where a strict national identity card system makes such purchases subjected to police scrutiny. The explosive device that went off in Male was similar in its construction to the ones which exploded in Ajmer and Hyderabad early this.
LTTE is another group which has been active in the region for quite sometime. The group is said to have bases in Tamil Nadu and there is a visible increase in its activities in the recent past. There were reports that LTTE operated as many as 25 training camps in Tamil Nadu. Periyar town served as a source of the group’s uniforms while Tuticorin provided a sanctuary to smugglers and a hospital in Tiruchi provided medical facilities to the wounded ’Tigers’. Thanjavur was their communication base and Nagapattinam was the hub of professional smugglers who ferried arms and ammunitions from India to Jaffna in Sri Lanka.
Even today LTTE cadres maintain a base in Tamil Nadu though the Manmohan Singh government refuses to acknowledge the fact, given its political compulsions in Tamil Nadu. Last month, a chance encounter between Sri Lanka Navy and LTTE exposed the existence of arms dump in India. The Navy seized a five and a half feet long small aircraft which could have been used to bomb key targets in Sri Lanka. The military said that the Tamil terrorists were using India as a transit point to ferry arms, ammunition and other equipments to Wanni. The destruction of their floating arsenal by the Sri Lankan Navy (it has sunk 9 out of 10 ships belonging to LTTE) had forced the LTTE to shift the supplies to their south Indian hideouts.
Lax legal and security environment facilitate the movement of terrorists in south Indian states provide a convenient route for them to move towards their destinations via sea, be it in Maldives or Sri Lanka or Pakistan or Bangladesh. Till 2005, terrorists have used south India only as a transit point for their terrorist activities but now they have started targeting key economic and scientific establishments in southern states. In January 2007, for instance, a LeT operative Imran was caught with a satellite phone, SIM cards, and maps indicating locations of airport and the offices of IT majors Wipro and Infosys Technologies. There have been a number of arrests made at regular intervals from all the four south Indian states, clearly indicating the strong emergence of terror networks in the region. This poses a serious threat to a region which houses country’s major nuclear power plants, space installations, science centres and information technology hubs.
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Anjali Sharma is Associate Fellow with Obsever Research Foundation in Chennai.
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