NEW DELHI — The Indian Mujahedeen — the prime suspect in the deadly bomb attack in Mumbai — has re-emerged three years after authorities thought they had virtually wiped out the terror group in a crackdown that left many of its leaders dead, in jail or hiding abroad.
The return of the shadowy network, which Indian officials have linked to Pakistani extremists, could herald a new wave of attacks across the country after three years of relative calm and threaten the renewed peace process with Islamabad.
The July 13 rush-hour attacks in three busy Mumbai neighborhoods killed 20 people and rekindled memories of 2008, when deadly explosions across the country struck fear in Indians.
Police said the Mumbai bombs, fabricated from ammonium nitrate, were similar to those used by the Indian Mujahedeen, leading police to focus on the group.
“It is one of the most likely targets for us,” said Deven Bharti, a senior Mumbai police official.
The coordinated bombings followed three smaller attacks in the past 10 months, two of which the group claimed responsibility.
The Indian Mujahedeen was not destroyed, said Ajit Doval, the former head of India’s Intelligence Bureau: “It was reorganizing itself.”
Although similar to earlier bombings, the Mumbai attacks were not accompanied by an email claiming responsibility, which had been a hallmark of Indian Mujahedeen attacks, Mr. Bharti said.
A Western diplomat following the case said the lack of a claim of responsibility is surprising, but most people are working under the assumption the group is responsible.
Investigators have been cautious about attributing blame for the new attacks to a group accused of ties to Pakistan, especially with fragile peace talks between the two countries’ foreign ministers under way this week.
Until arrests are made, “I cannot say with 100 percent comfort level that this is [the Indian Mujahedeen],” Mr. Bharti said.
The Indian Mujahedeen, which sprang from the banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India, is “a radical fringe of technically savvy, disaffected Indian Muslims who embrace Islamic extremism in response to perceived injustices by the Hindu majority,” according to a 2008 diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi obtained by WikiLeaks.
The youth were galvanized by Hindu extremists’ 1992 destruction of the 16th century Babri Mosque — and the bloody riots that followed — as well as a 2002 spasm of communal violence in the western state of Gujarat that killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslim.
Militants in Pakistan took advantage of this anger, recruiting Indian Muslims they met on trips to Saudi Arabia and giving them weapons and bomb-making training in camps run by the militant Lashkar-e-Taiba group in Pakistan, said a former Indian intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
The recruits then were sent back home to India to wreak havoc and received funding from Lashkar-e-Taiba through India’s unregulated hawala Islamic banking network, the official said.
Because of the clear operational links to groups in Pakistan, the Indian Mujahideen is not really seen as an indigenous terror group, the Western diplomat said.
Pakistani officials were not available for comment, and Pakistani militants denied any connection with the Indian Mujahedeen.
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