Omar Farooq Hussaini, tough nut for Abdul Basith

Hyderabad: Omar Farooq Hussaini, 22, was not radicalised at the time his cousins Abdullah Basith and Maaz Hasan Farooq were caught in 2014 in Bengal while on their way to Bangladesh.

After his cousins underwent a few counseling sessions with the police, one of them, Basith, started discussing with him what had happened in his life.

In a few weeks, the discussion slowly turned towards “Hijra” (migration), a term they used to represent leaving India for a foreign land for Jihad.

Omar was reluctant in the beginning as he feared being caught by the police. However, after a few months he was convinced.

Continuous persuasion by Basith and perusal of dozens of ISIS propaganda pages prompted Omar to steal Rs 11,300 from his father and join his cousins in their journey to the Islamic State that almost happened.

“Omar is fragile,” said an investigation official, “He confessed that Basith convinced him about the migration. He said he was encouraged to look up extremist propaganda pages on Twitter and Facebook.”

Omar already had a few backlogs in his previous examinations and he not keen on continuing his course in B.Sc Microbiology at Avanthi College.

His frustration about his career and his expensive smartphone induced him to spend more time on extremist content.

“He got really active in Twitter. He created multiple email IDs, probably to contact other sympathisers. Since he deleted most of his chats, we are now trying to recover them,” said an official. Omar grew up in a rich family.

As his graduation progressed, his parents were not happy with his exam results.

When he left home last Friday, his parents and relatives thought he must have ran away because of his failure in his previous exam. “Initially, a news spread in our locality that Omar had ran away from home because of his poor performance in college. We had not realised he was radicalised,” said his neighbour living in Gulshan Iqbal Colony, Chandrayangutta.