During his just-concluded visit (February 27 to March 1, 2010) to Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh is reported to have taken up with the Saudi leaders the question of Pakistan’s continued sponsorship of terrorism against India and sought their good offices for persuading Pakistan to act against anti-Indian terrorism directed from Pakistani territory.
Like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia has been following a dual policy on terrorism. It has taken ruthless action against Al Qaeda elements posing a threat to its internal security. At the same time, it has avoided taking action against Wahabi organizations which have been supporting terrorism in other countries. Many of the so-called charity organizations, which have been funding terrorist organizations in other countries including India and Bangladesh, are of Saudi origin. Despite international pressure on Saudi Arabia to act against such charity organizations and stop the flow of funds to global jihadi terrorism, the action taken by the Saudi authorities has been unsatisfactory.
It would be futile to expect that Saudi Arabia could be of assistance to India in dealing with jihadi terrorism emanating from Pakistan or Bangladesh. There has been a long history of links between jihadi terrorist elements in India and Saudi Arabia ever since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December,1992. In December 1993, coinciding with the first anniversary of the demolition of the masjid , there was a number of explosions in different railway trains in North India. The interrogation of one of the suspects arrested during the investigation revealed that the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) had organised them.
The suspect also alleged that C.A.M.Basheer, who was the President of the SIMI in the 1980s, had, along with one or two other members of the SIMI, attended a training course in the use of arms and ammunition and explosives in a camp of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) of Pakistan in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) run by one Salauddin, a Sudanese national, in the late 1980s. During the training, the JEI arranged a meeting between the SIMI activists and Lal Singh, alias Manjit Singh of the International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF), Canada, who was then living in Lahore. Lal Singh was arrested by the Gujarat Police in the middle of 1992 when he crossed over into India.
The JEI urged the SIMI and the ISYF to co-operate with each other for the "liberation" of the Sikhs of Punjab and the Kashmiris of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K). The co-operation project was code-named "K-2", standing for Kashmir-Khalistan. It was also stated that Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the then Amir of the JEI, had nominated Amirul Azim, the then Propaganda Secretary of the JEI, as the co-ordinator of the project.
The suspect also stated that the JEI had asked Basheer to send more members of the SIMI to Pakistan for training, but he could not do so due to logistic problems. In the early 1990s, Amirul Azim, accompanied by Salauddin, the Sudanese instructor, entered India via Bangladesh and met Basheer and his associates for discussing their future plans. They were told that in view of the difficulties experienced by them in sending more activists to Pakistan for training, instructions had been given to the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), the Kashmiri terrorist organisation, which is a wing of the JEI, to train SIMI cadres in its camps in J&K itself. The SIMI was asked to send its future batches to J&K for training.
Despite intensive searches by the police of different States, Basheer and his associates, who had allegedly undergone training in Pakistan, could not be arrested. Basheer, who must now be around 48, is from Parambayam in Kerala. After studying in the Union Christian College, Aluva, near Kochi, he worked for a brief while in the Safdarjung airport of New Delhi before taking to terrorism and absconding. Subsequent reports indicated that he had taken up residence in Saudi Arabia from where he was guiding the activities of the SIMI in India and organising its branches in other countries of the Gulf. In Saudi Arabia, he was also reported to have floated a new organisation called
the Muslim Development Force .
In 1992, the Time magazine of the US had carried an interview with one Commander Abu Abdel Aziz, with a picture of his in his henna-dyed beard and Afghan style fatigue. After the "Time", "al-Sharq al-Awsat", a Saudi-owned, London-based daily, ran a front-page story on Abu Abdel Aziz and his activities in Bosnia. In August 1994, Al-Sirat Al-Mustaqeem (The Straight Path), an Islamic journal published in Pakistan (Issue No. 33), carried an interview with Abu Abdel Aziz. The journal, without identifying his nationality, reported that Abu Abdel Aziz spoke perfect Urdu and that he had spent extended periods in Kashmir. It was stated that Abu Abdel Aziz's followers, believed to be mostly Indian Muslims from the Gulf, were part of the seventh battalion of the Bosnian Army (SEDMI KORPUS, ARMIJA REPUBLIKE BH).