The National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in Kochi on Friday found a Kerala man, Subahani Haja Moideen (34), guilty of waging war against a friendly country. His punishment will be announced on Monday. The man is said to have ties to the Islamic State and recently returned to the country.
Legal experts said this is the first case where Section 125 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), for waging a war against a friendly government, was invoked in a terrorism case in South India. In addition to Section 125, Moideen was found guilty in several sections, including 120 B (criminal conspiracy) and the Illicit Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). For the first time, a senior Indian Foreign Service official was also called as a witness in the case.
Moideen was previously questioned by French intelligence agencies in connection with the Paris attacks. While in Iraq, he told agencies that he worked with Abdel Hamid Abaaoud, a Belgian-Moroccan militant, who was the mastermind behind the November 2015 attacks in Paris. The NIA arrested him in Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu in 2016, where he was quietly living after his return to the country.
According to the prosecution, Moideen, who hails from a small town in the Idukki district of Kerala, had left for Jeddah in 2015 and then came to Turkey. Later, his handlers took him to the Syrian borders before transferring him to Raqqa for intensive weapons training.
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After three weeks of training, he told investigators that he was sent to Mosul, Iraq, and enrolled in a team led by a French-speaking leader. During one of the attacks, he said he saw one of his aides burned alive, after which he fled the battle site, but was captured by other IS militants. He told the investigation team that he was fired only after assuring ISIS leaders that he will carry out terrorist activities in India. The prosecution said that when he was arrested he was planning attacks against some judges and senior political leaders.
According to the NIA, Moideen, who belongs to a middle-class family, worked in a family-run cloth store in Thodupuzha after dropping out of college. When he started drinking alcohol, his family forced him to get married. To quit alcohol, his wife later advised him to take up religious studies and he became a small-time religious scholar. He told interrogators that he was later drawn to the teachings of Anwar al Awlaki, one of Al Qaeda’s mentors, and began chatting with others through the encrypted Telegram app and soon became radical. Before his trip to Iraq, he was also involved in the Kanakamala terror plot in Kannur in 2015.
During the investigation, it was also discovered that after leaving the areas ruled by the Islamic State, Moideen arrived in Turkey and gave an incorrect affidavit at the Indian Embassy saying that his travel documents were stolen during a religious trip. The NIA smelled it while investigating another returnee from the Islamic State of Maharashtra, Areeb Majeed, who is now in judicial custody.
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