Hyderabad: In the second week of July in 2014, after attending a protest against Israel in the Old City, Abdullah Basith sat in his room and started browsing ISIS propaganda pages on Facebook and Twitter rigorously. He was frustrated and angry, about his life, about Gaza and about Babri Masjid.
Scrolling through the videos and posts for a few days, he came across an impressive profile of a person named Abu Aziz al-Andalusi, who claimed to be a sniper with ISIS in Idlib. Inspired by the real time updates of ISIS he put up in the propaganda pages, Basith sent him a friend request.
With long chats in Skype and Telegram in July last week, Andalusi, who accepted in two days, changed Basith’s outlook on life drastically. Basith’s parents was never aware of his online activities, which would later land him in police custody twice for his efforts to join ISIS.
“Basith grew up in Madina, Saudi Arabia, along with his elder sister. His father Arif, who ran a small business in Madina, relocated to Nazeeb Nagar in Chandrayangutta with his family when Basith was 14,” said an officer from the Special Investigation Team (SIT). Growing up under the strict rules of his father, Basith had started hating his life.
When he failed in 10 subjects in college, his father beat him up twice, leaving him more frustrated.
Read: Act tough against ISIS recruits, MEA to Telangana
The friendship with ISIS sympathisers online gave him a satisfaction that he could not achieve in outside world. “He was a different person online, confident and smart. Probably, he must have thought leaving home and joining ISIS would make him that person in real life,” said a close friend of Basith.
After chatting for several days, Andaluzi disappeared from social media, leaving Basith restless. In the next few days, Basith searched frantically on Facebook till he found a person named Abu Zakariya from Hatay, a Turkish province located in Syria border.
In the following days, Abu Zakaria had long chats with Basith and offered him help to get to Syria. As per the plan, Basith should take a flight from Delhi to Istanbul and then take the “Jihadi Superhighway” with the help of an ISIS associate.
Zakariya told him to leave his phone at home to lose police tails, and at Istanbul, he should buy a TurkCell SIM card for communication purposes. “When he was trying for a Turkish Visa, following a tip off, police impounded his passport and he was left with no way to get to Turkey. That was why he chose to cross the Bangladesh border and reach Syria via Afghanistan,” said an intelligence official.
Basith and two other ISIS fanboys from Hyderabad then came in contact with a person from Surat, who introduced them to a youngster from Karimnagar. The four youngsters had a series of Skype chats with an ISIS recruiter, who chalked out their plan to get to Syria via Bangladesh.
On August 29, 2014, four of them left their homes in secret and took a train to Kolkata, where they were detained by the Telangana police. “After he was counseled by the police, his parents were more strict.”
“His father never let him out at night or early morning. He was also not allowed to use laptops or smartphones. But probably the counseling and restrictions didn’t work,” said one of Basith’s friends.
All three remanded to custody for 14 days
Before leaving his home in Chandrayanagutta, Abdul Basith, 20, left a note for his parents stating that that they would “meet them in Jannat (heaven)”. “… I am vexed with this present life. I am going. I will meet you in heaven”. Once he got the note, Basith’s father Mr Mohammed Abdul Arif lodged a missing complaint with the police who tracked him down along with his two cousins.
Basith, Syed Omer Farooq Hussaini (22) and Maaz Hasan Farooq (22) were produced in the Nampally criminal courts on Monday. They were remanded to judicial custody in Chanchalguda Jail for 14 days. According to city joint commissioner of police (Crimes and SIT) T. Prabhakar Rao, the three had confessed that they wanted to meet pro-Pakistani leader Ms Asiyan Andrabi, the chief of Duktharan-e-Millat (daughters of the nation) a Kashmiri women’s group.
The accused wanted to use the name of their uncle, ex-SIMI president Syed Salahuddin, while introducing themselves to Ms Andrabi and cross the borders with the help of her group. “They didn’t know Asiyan. In Srinagar they wanted to meet her and seek her help. From there they wanted to reach Jalalabad in Afghanistan via Pakistan and then go to Syria. They said they wanted to be part of the establishment of the caliphate by IS. Earlier they had tried the Bangladesh route and now they wanted to take the Pak route,” said an investigation official.
They were motivated through the Internet and social media and had recently watched the 2012 documentary Inshaallah Kashmir directed by Asvin Kumar.
The trio would closely follow news stories pertaining to IS victories and losses in Syria and Iraq. Basith had been rusticated from Deccan Engineering College where he had been pursuing his BTech (Computer Science Engineering).
He had attended an interior decoration course for six months in Hamstech Institution Himayatnagar but discontinued that due to pressure from his parents. The police said that he always wanted to project a heroic image.
Meanwhile, Maaz Hasan, son of Mr Aijaz Mohiuddin Wasim, was in his third year of BE Instrumentation course in Mufaqqam College. Syed Omar Farooq Hussaini, son of Mr Azisullah Hussaini, was studying BSc Microbiology from Avanthi College Barkatpura. Both had black logs against their names.
Police seized a Dell tab, Indigo air tickets from Nagpur to Srinagar and Rs 20,000 cash from Basith, a smart phone and cash of Rs 10,500 from Maaz Hasan and an iPhone and cash of Rs 11,300 from Omer Farooq. Police will file a petition for their custody in the court on Tuesday. "The trio agreed that Indians had been ill treated by ISIS Arabs but they still wanted to go there and fight," said the cops.
A case of criminal conspiracy under 120 B, 121 (waging war against nation) and under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act has been booked against the accused. Police said two others, Abrar and Noman, who had been apprehended along with Basith and Maaz the last time in Kolkata, were counseled and were not involved now.
Counselling of youth is effective, says cop
Hyderabad police commissioner Mahender Reddy said the process of counselling to deradicalise youth headed for terror zones was effective. He said counselling was fruitful with 99 per cent of radicalised youngsters. The 1 per cent may slip away, but the police keeps a strict vigil on them.
That is how the trio could be caught in Nagpur, he said. “Counselling is an established way in the world to deradicalise a person. It did yield positive results in the case of youngsters in Hyderabad. But a few people remained unchanged and we caught them,” said Mr Mahender Reddy. He said the police cannot arrest somebody just because he is thinking of joining ISIS.
“Their thoughts should turn into action in order to detain them under the law,” he said adding that 17 youngsters who tried to go to Syria had been counselled by the police so far.
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