SIMI cell under Taufique was tech-savvy

AHMEDABAD: Abdul Subhan alias Taufique Bilal, the Mumbai-based techie provided the technical support to SIMI's terror module, is now the most wanted man for the Ahmedabad crime branch which is banking on Mumbai police to nab him shortly.
While Gujarat police chief P C Pande on Saturday identified Taufique as a Wipro employee, a background check found that he used to work for a franchisee of the IT giant in the late 90s.Hailing from a town on the Karnataka-Maharashtra border, Taufique worked in Bangalore and Hyderabad before moving to Mumbai and is described by the police as "a highly motivated fanatic".
His involvement has once again trained the focus on the effort by the jihadi outfits to net tech-savvy youth. The SIMI cell under Taufique had many members proficient in IT skills. Significantly, for someone who attended a village madrassa before attending the Darul Uloom at Deoband, Abdul Bashar, according to sources in police, was remarkably familiar with IT, besides having an impressive facility with English.
Sources said the Mufti from Azamgarh partnered Taufique to draft the email that was sent warning of the blasts engineered by the jehadis at Ahmedabad and, before that, in Jaipur and three towns of UP ��� Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad.
Police officials who have interrogated the accused were struck by tricks the SIMI activists used to mislead the investigators. "They are tough, trained even to enlist the support of human rights activists and politicians by accusing police," a source said.
To many, it marks the coming of age of terrorism in India as terror cells in the west are known for networking with human rights activists and allege rights violations to fend off the attention of suspicious authorities.