THE WEEK INVESTIGATION

In its zeal to nail Pakistan, did India ignore leads on a mysterious Maldivian among 26/11 terrorists?

By Anupam Dasgupta/Male

Forty-eight hours before 26/11, a family in the Maldives got a phone call. A familiar voice said, “I have good news for you.” It was their son, calling from Pakistan. He said he was “bound for heaven… in two days’ time.”
The full import of his words did not dawn on the family then. But they got a vague scent of his looming participation in something sinister—which turned out to be the terror attack in Mumbai on November 26, 2008. The family later claimed that he was among the nine slain terrorists.
Investigations by THE WEEK revealed that the claim had made the Maldivian government  institute an “in-house” investigation. But the probe hit a stonewall thanks to India’s lack of interest in exploring any latent Maldivian links in 26/11.

The Maldivian government required inputs from India to verify the family’s claim. The Maldives national security adviser’s office and officials of the Maldives ministry of foreign affairs were in touch with their Indian counterparts. But the discussions were limited to the mechanics of the attack. Top Maldivian security officials and politicians were aware of a Maldivian link in 26/11. But the probe did not get far.

“When families claim something, they generally do have fairly good information,” said Dr Ahmed Shaheed, who was Maldivian foreign minister during 26/11 and till November 11, 2010. The family had informed top Maldivian administrative and security officials that their son had travelled to Mumbai on the night of November 26, 2008. They  claimed to have identified him from the Mumbai Police’s sketches of the attackers.

The Maldivian link became known when Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed said in a media interview in October 2009: “I believe that the identity of all the dead terrorists in the Mumbai attack has not been broken down into nationalities. I feel there is a Maldivian connection to the attack…. We have information from the families of terrorists who are still in the Maldives about this.” He said, “Any terrorist attack through the underbelly of India, that is peninsular India, would have to go through Maldivian waters”, and “if we [the Maldives] had the equipment we would’ve been much more vigilant about what was going to happen in the Mumbai attack.”

Maldivian security officials tried to get to the bottom of the matter. A security official in Male told THE WEEK that the names of two of the nine slain terrorists sounded Maldivian—the way they were spelt and written conformed to linguistic traits peculiar to the Maldives. Based on the family’s claims, Maldivian officials zeroed in on Nasir alias Abu Umar, one of the two Nariman House attackers.

The Mumbai Police charge sheet showed that Nasir hailed from Pakistan’s Faisalabad. It said that he and his accomplice, Babar Imran alias Abu Aakasha, went to the Nariman House after landing at Badwar Park’s Machchimar Colony in Colaba on 26/11. Nasir planted 10kg of explosives near the building’s staircase. They took the Holtzbergs (the Jewish inmates) hostage and made them talk to Israeli embassy officials in Delhi. All the while, Nasir and Imran were in touch with their Pakistani handlers via a VoIP service provider based in New Jersey, USA.

Another name in the charge sheet resembling Nasir’s is Nazir Ahmad alias Abu Umer. Both Nasir and Nazir are shown to hail from Faisalabad. No more details of their addresses are given. But the charge sheet mentions the districts and villages of the other seven slain terrorists. “There was a grey area between what the Indians were able to find out in their investigation and what the families or others [in the Maldives] already knew about the antecedents of the Mumbai operation,” said Shaheed, who is tipped to be foreign policy adviser to the Maldivian president.

So was there a Maldivian link to 26/11? If so, why did Delhi remain silent about it? Were there grounds to pursue the case? Perhaps the answer is in the complex mosaic of national security intelligence exchanges between the Maldives and India post 26/11. After the interrogation of Ajmal Kasab, the only 26/11 terrorist caught alive, the national spotlight was on the Lashkar-e-Toiba. India wanted to convey to Pakistan that the taped conversations between the attackers and their handlers in Pakistan pointed to Islamabad’s patronage of non-state actors like the LeT. India wanted to turn the spotlight on Pakistan being the cradle of anti-India terror. In the administrative hysteria to get at Pakistan in the strongest possible terms, we may have lost out on auxiliary, but nonetheless crucial, facets of the attack.

The chunk of information traffic between the Maldives and India post 26/11 was on a “strict need-to-know basis”. The Maldivian probe was hamstrung by the Indian security establishment’s lack of interest. “It served us no purpose to proceed on the matter beyond a point,” said a Maldivian security official.

But the modus operandi of the attack was a wake-up call for New Delhi as terrorists were using the seas to target India. Groups like the LeT and the Al-Shabaab, operating from the Somalian coast, have been trying to develop maritime capabilities. That the LeT’s small group of “marine jihadis” are being shaped by the Pakistan Marines near Karachi is open secret. Defence Minister A.K. Antony had spoken about the threat from militant jihadis via the sea route.

On if India ever probed a likely Maldivian connection to 26/11, Madhukar Gupta, Union home secretary during the attack, said, “To the best of my knowledge, no. The objective was to carry out an investigation that looked at all relevant angles. That was most important then.” M.L. Kumawat, who was special secretary (internal security) in the home ministry at the time of the attack, declined to comment on the matter. “It won’t be fair to comment on this,” he said. THE WEEK tried to contact T.S. Tirumurti, joint secretary (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives) in the ministry of external affairs, but to no avail. Officials in the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), too, were tight-lipped.

Apparently, the Maldives is part of the LeT’s plan to strategically encircle India. With LeT proxies like the Indian Mujahideen recruiting Nepalese Muslims to sustain future jihad with India, Maldivian security officers are grappling to tackle what Mark Sedgwick, terrorism historian at Aarhus University in Denmark, calls “threat-radicalism.” Experts say that using Nepalese and Maldivian youths against India will serve the strategic interests of the LeT and Pakistan.

The LeT infiltrated Maldives through its proxy charity organisation Idara Khidmat-e-Khalq (IKK), which got a toehold in the Maldives after the 2004 tsunami, said Animesh Roul, executive director of the Society for the Study of Peace and Conflict, New  Delhi. “The tsunami was an opportunity for entities like the IKK to bond with Maldivian nationals. History shows that natural disasters had formed bridges between nationalities,” said an Indian strategic expert.

Terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna said terrorism was a considerable threat to the Maldives and the government there was fully aware of its magnitude. “This is in sync with al Qaeda inspired wave of radicalisation across South Asia. There are over 100 Maldivian men who have received terrorist training on the Pak-Afghan border,” he said.

Roul said Maldivian youths were adopting jihadi-Salafi Islam as their ideology. “The phenomenon is leading to jihadisation of Maldivian society. With a lot of money from Saudi Arabia pouring in, things are getting increasingly worse,” he said.

Male’s central street, Majeedhee Magu, gives a glimpse of the liberal democratic character of the capital city of this Sunni Muslim atoll nation. Women pillion riding young men on two-wheelers is a common sight in Male. People enjoy free lives, with a modicum of respect for things religious. The ubiquitous glittering mosques occupy pride of place in downtown Male. Locals say the mosques were built during former president Gayoom’s time and mostly bankrolled by the oil-rich Saudi regime.

But Male’s surface democracy masks an eerie undercurrent of “radicalisation in belief and action” among Maldivian youths. The threat-radicalism in the Maldives is spearheaded by charities and proxies of Pak terror groups. The IKK initially penetrated Maldivian society under cover of humanitarian activities. According to Indian intelligence sources, the IKK has distinct ties with the Jammat-ud-Dawa and the LeT. Experts say that young Maldivians are moving away from old moderate identities and gravitating to Salafi Islam. Thus “unfreezed”, they are bonding with like-minded and believers. This is when “ideological articulation of dissatisfaction” occurs, said Neil Smelser, professor of sociology, University of California, Berkeley.

While the silent threat-radicalism has worried Maldivian authorities, it is a cause of concern for India, too, as the number of Maldivian youths travelling to Pakistan has gone up significantly. The Maldivian government estimates around 600 of its young men to be in Pakistan.
The anti-Israeli demonstration by a few thousand Maldivian radicals on December 17 near a tsunami memorial points to the rampant radicalisation. The radicals were protesting the arrival of Israeli eye surgeons in Male. White flags with scribbles in Dhivehi and Arabic indicated that the proponents of Zionism were not welcome. The “radical creep” and Arabisation among young Maldivians were never so visible.

“Visible radicalisation is the problem in the Maldives,” said an Indian diplomat in the Maldives. It is the result of an individual becoming more receptive to “new world views.” A “cognitive opening” on the part of the willing individual to exterior influences aids the process. “We don’t discount the existence of sleeper terrorist cells linked with the LeT. But the advantage for the Maldivian government has been the cohesive character of its society. Social anonymity is not exactly a huge advantage in a country with a population of just 3.5 lakh plus,” he said. He said the real worry was pre-9/11 mindset of the Maldivian government, as it “results in alert fatigue and national security could get compromised.”

It surprised India when Nasheed freed two prime accused in the 2007 Sultan Park bombings in Male in August 2010. “We are planning to send Mohamed Sobah and Ahmed Naseer [the two accused] back to jail. We feel they are dangerous to our society and we are not willing to risk internal security,” said Ahmed Muneer, deputy commissioner of the Maldives police.

The immediate challenge for the Maldivian government is to bring back its youths fighting in Waziristan and Afghanistan and integrate them with society. A hurdle is that Maldivian laws do not allow preventive punitive action against terror suspects. “The ringmaster [prime accused] of the Sultan Park bombing was allowed to leave the country. The incident wasn’t fully investigated. The ringmaster was a young boy. We need to find out who was behind the ringmaster. I think there are unanswered questions,” said Shaheed. That the Maldives has integration problems is known. But Maldivian authorities do not know if the park bombing was takfiri jihad—where fellow Muslims are targeted—or if it had to do with global Salafi designs.

The LeT’s interest in the Maldives is to catalyse a change in the mindset of the Maldivian youths. Groups like the Jamiyyatul Salaf propagate a stricter version of Islam. Local radical preachers are helping fast-track the process of “mind control” among local youths. And with the Maldives going through a political transition into a liberal democracy after president Gayoom’s authoritarian rule, the radicals are exploiting the new-found democratic freedoms to express themselves freely.

The Maldives’ problems are aggravated by the extreme politics of the Adhalaat Party, which has the tacit blessings of the Maldivian ministry of Islamic affairs that was set up recently to deal with the policy aspects of Islam as a state religion. A Maldivian intelligence official said a large section of Maldivian youths were getting hooked to ideas of transnational jihad. “The signs are ominous as seven radicals chose to contest the Maldivian polls in 2008. Though all [of them] lost, we found that Islam is being increasingly used as a political tool in Maldivian affairs,” he said.

The Maldives’ centrality to the Indian Ocean affairs has been of strategic significance to India. India chose to augment the Maldives’ surveillance capabilities and heighten its maritime domain awareness, a tall task given the Maldives’ resource crunch and the near-impossibility of monitoring the sea 24×7. Also, the Indian Navy has been criticised for not having a robust maritime architecture in the Lakshadweep sea. “There should be more exercises on the part of the Indian Navy in the Lakshadweep sea,” said Vijay Sakhuja, research director at the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi. “India should look forward to taking the lead role in a multilateral security cooperation in the Indian Ocean that involves the Maldives and Sri Lanka.”

The call for “sea jihad” in the Indian Ocean by Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda ally in Somalia, is another threat. Sakhuja said Somali pirates entering the east Arabian sea could lead to “radicalisation of piracy.” It would have a serious bearing on the affairs of the Maldives sea basin and India’s role in the Indian Ocean rim.

The LeT has been eyeing the Maldives since early 2000, when its headhunters travelled to Male. The arrest of cleric Ibrahim Fauzee from an al Qaeda safe house in Karachi in 2002 jolted Maldivian authorities. He landed up in Guantanamo Bay but was sent back to the Maldives in 2005. Intelligence estimates put the number of LeT sleeper cells in the Maldives at half a dozen. India’s Intelligence Bureau estimates more than 3,000 LeT facilitators and instigators in the Maldives.

Now the Maldives is giving final shape to a counter-terrorism bill with help from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Interpol. “Once the bill gets underway, we would have sufficient powers to act preemptively on matters of national security,” Muneer said. “Our radical preachers are enjoying street credibility and radicalisation is visible at the street level. It’s a problem for us, but things would aggravate if the radicals get integrated into Maldivian politics.” That there is Salafisation of Maldivian society is clear. “The spread of an extremist belief system is fuelled by hate preachers like Sheikh Fareed and Sheikh Ilyas. Both are being surveilled,” said a Maldivian intelligence official.

The Maldivian diaspora’s support to terrorism is another concern. “A couple of hundred Maldivian youths had left the island nation. Their families have never heard from them since,” said Mohamed Hameed, head of the internal intelligence department of the Maldivian police. Maldivian Muslims get radicalised for status and a sense of belonging. Discrimination against Muslims and the issues surrounding Iraq and Guantanamo also play a part.

Radicalisation of the Maldives started with Gayoom patronising the flight of students to Pakistani madrasas. Many of them landed up in schools that preached jihad. A Maldivian officer cited the case of a middle class man from Male who became a radical preacher: “He is now a teacher at a Salafi school near Islamabad. He was my neighbour for some time. Only later did I learn that he had gone to Pakistan and had been giving hate speeches.”

Hameed said “recruitment is taking place all the while.” Radicals like Yoosuf Izadhy—a militant jihadi who is said to have ties with al Qaeda, according to leaked diplomatic cables prepared by then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice—are roaming free. Izadhy was planning to create a terrorist base in the Maldives with support from a Waziristan-based group. He and Hasnain Hameedh had operational aspirations. The latter was in touch with people trained by the LeT in Pakistan. Maldives National Security Adviser Ameen Faisal said Pak authorities had arrested Izadhy and eight other Maldivians with weapons on the Pak-Afghan border.

“Salafisation might induce changes in the social and political micro-climate of the Maldives,” said Muzaffar Naeem, a Maldivian student of film and television studies at Australia’s Queensland University. “But how we fight the local radical mullahs who are advising us on how and what to wear and what to read and what not, I guess the problem lies there.”

It will help if Maldivian authorities acquire legal teeth for preventive action against radicals and to curb the non-violent radicalism that could lead to violent action. But the challenge is to frustrate the “operational jihadi aspirations” of local youths like Sobah and Naseer. Said Gunaratna: “One should first tackle ideological extremism because it eventually effects terrorism. A region-focused collaborative plan would help India-Maldives-Sri Lanka and Pakistan to devise counter-terrorism strategies and mainstream those on the margins.”

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