Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): The first arrested suspect of a lone-wolf attack module, Mohd Faraz, conceived the idea to become an armed fighter against those opposed to his religion while surfing the internet during the second wave of the Covid pandemic.
Five years later, on June 12, the arrest of Faraz from the Qazi Camp area of Bhopal by the Madhya Pradesh Police's Anti-Terror Squad (MP ATS) led to the busting of an alleged radicalisation and potential lone-wolf attackers' module being handled by an overseas handler from Pakistan.
Officials informed that it was during the second and deadliest Covid wave that Faraz, who had studied at a madrasa in Deoband in western Uttar Pradesh, started surfing the internet for jihad-related information. Months later, his interest in the subject and related information connected him to the overseas handler operating from Pakistan.
Faraz had not confined himself to the module but was scouting for other men who would later be turned into lone-wolf attackers. As part of the same motive, he drafted his old madrasa friend, a native of Nanauta in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, 38-year-old Naeem Abdullah Qureshi, into the closed group around three years ago.
Not just Faraz, but other members of the group regularly met through online meetings coordinated by the overseas handler and 65-year-old Izhar-Ul-Haq from the Madhubani district of Bihar.
Radical literature, videos
Investigations so far have led the police to seize Arabic jihadi literature, and they also seized a multitude of videos, some of which show violence unleashed by terror groups against non-believers in Afghanistan and other parts of the world, particularly places where ISIS and other Islamic terror groups are highly active.
Fake identity
Faraz was operating under the identity of Khalid Saifullah, the alleged mastermind of the 2005 IISC Bengaluru attack, the 2006 RSS headquarters attack, and the 2008 attack on the CRPF camp in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, who was eliminated by unidentified gunmen in the Sindh province of Pakistan in 2025, sources added.
The Amir
Haq, who was arrested on Monday from Bihar, is now in ATS custody till June 22. The investigations suggest that Haq was the Amir of the group of fighters who were to be trained in lone-wolf terror attacks. The officials claimed that they have obtained vital information from him, and shortly they will act accordingly on the inputs.
