An Islamist cell which executed Maldives’ first-ever terror strike had connections with Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives in India, investigators have discovered.Moosa Inas, a Laamu atoll resident charged with having triggered the explosive device which went off in Male’s Sultan Park on September 29, had travelled to Thiruvananthapuram in December 2005. Inas arrived in Kerala on a flight through Colombo, and then crossed the India-Pakistan border at Attari to meet contacts linked to the Jamia Salafiyya in Faisalabad — a seminary that has produced key Lashkar commanders.
Twelve tourists were injured in the explosion, which was executed both to signal Islamist opposition to the government and to cripple the islandsÂ’ economy.
| Designed using a low-grade explosive, the device was similar in its construction to those which went off recently in Ajmer and Hyderabad. |
Maldives authorities say at least 10 key operatives, including computer engineer Abdul Latif Ibrahim and Ali Shameem, have fled to Pakistan. Both were on a watch list of suspects the Maldives government believed were preparing to receive training at Islamist facilities in Pakistan. Inas, however, was deported from Colombo along with another suspect, Ahmed Naseer, before they could catch connecting flights to Karachi.
Little information on Inas’ contacts in Pakistan — where he again travelled in 2006, transiting through Colombo and Dubai — has so far been made available by the joint Maldives-U.S. team which is investigating the Sultan Park bombing. However, a growing mass of evidence suggests that Lashkar cadre in India were activated to support the cell of which he was a part.
Asif Ibrahim, a Maldivian national arrested in Kerala in April 2005, told investigators that he had been tasked with the setting up of a support unit for a new Maldives-based terror group, the Jamaat-ul-Muslimeen, in Thiruvananthapuram. Asif IbrahimÂ’s handlers hoped that the unit would be able to procure bomb components more easily than in Maldives, where a strict national identity card system makes such purchases vulnerable to police investigation.
Although Asif Ibrahim was unable to set up the cell, the Lashkar activated several local operatives in support of the enterprise. Jamshedpur resident Tariq Akhtar was summoned to Dhaka in 2005, where he received orders from the Pakistan-based Lashkar commander Abdul Aziz to meet Islamists in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Maldives. Mumbai resident Shami Ahmad Shah was tasked with obtaining a fake passport for Akhtar.
Interestingly, IndiaÂ’s intelligence services warned last year of efforts by the Karachi-based mafioso Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar to set up operations in Maldives through a Dubai-based firm, Dolphin Management Services. Elements linked to the Dawood mafia are thought to have been involved in at least one recent effort to ship Lashkar terrorists to Mumbai through the Indian Ocean.
Terror funded by tsunami aid?
Experts believe that at least some of the infrastructure for the Maldives terror cell might have been financed with funds provided by the Idara Khidmaq-e-Khalq, the Lashkar’s charity wing. Although the IKK is proscribed by the U.S. and India, it continues to operate legitimately in Pakistan, raising several million dollars a year through religious donations. According to documents published online by the IKK, the organisation spent Pakistani Rs.17.2 million on tsunami relief in Maldives, Sri Lanka and Indonesia during 2005 — its single largest charitable operation.
However, government officials in Maldives say there is no record of the IKK having registered for relief work — a sign that the funds might have been funnelled to Islamists who then used it to build terror infrastructure. Similar strategies had helped the Lashkar-e-Taiba significantly expand its presence in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir after the earthquake of 2005. According to reports that appeared in the United Kingdom and the U.S. media, part of the estimated $10 million raised by the IKK for earthquake relief was used to fund a 2006 plot to blow up 10 transatlantic commercial flights.