Terrorists and their invisible handlers

Thursday 30th July, 2020

There are many unanswered questions about the Easter Sunday carnage; the identities of the perpetrators of the terror attacks are known but the real mastermind of the bombings has not been identified. It was initially thought that the National Thowheed Jamaath (NTJ) leader Zaharn Hashim had planned and executed the terror attacks. Former State Intelligence Service (SIS) Director Senior DIG (retd) Nilantha Jayawardena has said Zahran was not the mastermind the terror strikes. He has made no revelation. The NTJ built a sophisticated terror network, complete with training centres and armouries. It had stockpiled explosives sufficient for many more attacks. No terrorist leader carries out a suicide attack, having built such an organisation. As we have argued previously, Zahran obviously had a boss cum handler. Jayawardena has said Zahran’s mentor, Naufer Moulavi, based in Qatar, was the mastermind of the Easter Sunday terror. The question is whether Naufer was handled by someone else.

It is popularly believed that Zahran took orders from the ISIS. Naufer may be having links to the ISIS, but it is also possible that he has been working for other organisations, including foreign intelligence agencies. Strangely, it took four days for the ISIS to claim responsibility for the Easter Sunday attacks. Had the ISIS actually ordered the carnage, it would have lost no time in claiming the responsibility for the gruesome crime. This makes one wonder whether the ISIS took the credit for the attacks another organisation had got the NTJ to carry out, either through Naufer or someone else. Foreign spy agencies are believed to have infiltrated the ISIS. The Independent (UK) exclusively reported, on 19 Oct. 2016, that the ISIS, which was losing control of Mosul, its last stronghold in Iraq, was ‘beset by divisions, desertions and the fear that it has been infiltrated by the Western intelligence agencies, foremost among them the British’. So, the possibility of some infiltrators in the ISIS having controlled Zahran, either through Naufer or directly, cannot be ruled out.

It has now been revealed that an NTJ plan to carry out a second wave of terror attacks had gone pear-shaped due to the military crackdown on its hideouts, in the immediate aftermath of the Easter carnage. This is proof that the NTJ was expected to function without Zahran. Who was to run it?

Meanwhile, the former SIS chief has likened Naufer to the late Anton Balasingham, who, he says, inspired LTTE cadres to become suicide bombers. But, according to our information, Balasingham, a former employee of the British High Commission in Colombo, played no role in producing LTTE suicide bombers. He was the LTTE spokesman cum negotiator. It is his wife, Adele, who produced suicide bombers; she was instrumental in brainwashing female Tiger combatants and turning them into ‘the children of fire’, as Prabhakaran used to call his suicide cadres. She wore the LTTE uniform and presented her trainees with cyanide capsules when they completed their training. She is currently living in London as a free woman while the British government is campaigning against war crimes. The male LTTE cadres were produced under Prabhakaran’s supervision. Balasingham was widely known as the LTTE’s ideologue, but Prabhakaran did not heed anyone’s advice or views. He was only a ventriloquist’s dummy and it was Prabhakaran’s voice we heard through him.

The focus of all investigations into the Easter Sunday carnage has been on tracing those whose lapses enabled the NTJ terrorists to carry out suicide attacks. Investigators will have to focus on the external links of the NTJ and find out who was actually behind the bombings if threats to national security are to be neutralized effectively.