NEW DELHI, Sep 25: A Kochi court has found a Kerala-born Islamic State activist guilty of “waging war against a friendly country” – France. The judgement pronouncing him guilty was delivered by the special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court on Friday but the quantum of punishment to Subahani Haja Moideen (34) will be announced on Monday.
Moideen was earlier 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 Paris attacks. The NIA had arrested him from Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu in 2016 where he was living discreetly after his return to the country.
According to the prosecution, Moideen, who hails from a small town in Kerala’s Idukki district, had left for Jeddah in 2015 and later reached Turkey. Later he was taken to Syrian borders by his handlers before he was moved to Raqqa for an intense arms training.
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 his aides burned alive after which he fled the battle scene but was captured by other IS militants. He told the probe team that he was let off only after assuring the IS leadership that he would carry out terror activities in India. The prosecution said when he was arrested he was planning attacks against some judges and senior political leaders.
The NIA sources said Moideen, belonging to a middle-class family, worked in a family-run cloth shop in Thodupuzha after dropping out from college. When he turned to drinking alcohol, his family got him married and his wife introduced him to religious books to wean him away from alcohol. Moideen soon turned a small-time religious scholar and was attracted to teachings of Anwar al Awlaki, one of the mentors of Al Qaeda, and started chatting with others through encrypted Telegram app and was soon radicalised. Before his trip to Iraq, he also participated in Kanakamala terror plot in Kannur in 2015, he told the investigators.
During the investigation, it was also found that after leaving IS-ruled areas, Moideen came to Turkey and gave a wrong affidavit in the Indian Embassy saying that his travel papers were stolen during a religious trip. The NIA got a whiff of him while it was investigating another IS-returnee from Maharashtra, Areeb Majeed, currently in judicial custody.
Legal experts said this was the first case in which Section 125 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) – for waging war against a friendly government – was invoked in a terror case in south India. It was also for the first time that a senior Indian Foreign Service official was called as a witness in the case.
(Manas Dasgupta)