The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has arrested four people in connection with the Tamil Nadu radicalisation and recruitment case. The case is an off-shoot of an investigations into the Coimbatore car bomb blast case.
With the latest arrests, the total number of people nabbed in the case has touched eight. The accused have been identified as Ahmed Ali, Jawahar Sathik, Raja Abdullah alias MAC Raja, and Sheik Dawood. They were allegedly radicalized by Jameel Basha, who is the founder of Madras Arabic College, which was later renamed as Kovai Arabic College.
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Basha and his associates Irshath, Syed Abdur Rahman and Mohammed Hussain were taking Arabic language classes in Tamil Nadu and in the guise of this they subtly infused Salafi-Jihadi ideology to these gullible youth. They were previously chargesheeted by the NIA for using classrooms and social media to radicalise and recruit youth.
The accused had promoted Khilafat ideology and martyrdom through jihad, pushing the gullible youth to resort to violence and armed struggle to set up an Islamic state.
These classes resulted in the Coimbatore car bomb blast on October 23, 2022, when suicide bomber Jamesha Mubeen, a self-styled ISIS operative, detonated an IED bomb in front of the ancient Arulmigu Kottai Sangameshwarar Thirukovil temple at Eswaran Kovil Street, Ukkadam. Mubeen had pledged allegiance to ISIS's self-proclaimed Caliph, Abu-Al-Hasan Al-Hashimi Al-Qurashi, and wanted to target non-believers.
Later, the investigation agency discovered that prior to the attack, the accused had met secretly at the Viyyur high-security prison in Thrissur, Kerala, and Sathyamangalam reserve forest in Erode, Tamil Nadu, to plan the conspiracy.