Plan to kill Kanhaiya Lal was hatched on June 20 after Anjuman rally
The national security agencies are now examining whether the PFI-Muslim Brotherhood link was used to translate Nupur Sharma’s remarks into Arabic and spread through the Brotherhood network.
Investigations into the Udaipur ISIS style beheading of tailor Kanhaiya Lal on June 28 have led the focus to a June 20 meeting of select Barelvi Muslims immediately after a rally of Anjuman Taleemul Islam in Udaipur against Nupur Sharma.

While Kanhaiya Lal killer Ghous Mohammed has told his interrogators that the decision to behead the tailor for supporting Nupur Sharma was taken in this meeting, the others present in the meeting are now denying that any such decision had been taken. According to Ghous Mohammed, it was at this meeting that he volunteered to decapitate Kanhaiya Lal with others present agreeing to provide legal, logistical, or financial support to the families of the murderers after the crime. All those who were identified by Ghous as present in the June 20 meeting have been interviewed by the investigating agencies. The killing of Kanhaiya Lal was initially planned for June 26, but the tailor did not turn up at his shop that day. The murder was executed two days later.
The Udaipur Anjuman is headed by Mujeeb Siddque, who is now being interviewed by the investigating agencies. The Anjuman is part of the Ahle-Sunnat ideology of which Barelvis are a sub-sect.
While Anjuman has become an organization of interest in the murder probe, the investigators are also focused on the Popular Front of India-Social Democratic Party of India links with savage killing. The main accused Riyaz Attari and one of the key conspirators Farhad Mohammed Sheikh alias Babla were both members of the PFI, which in turn has links with the global Muslim Brotherhood.
The national security agencies are now examining whether the PFI-Muslim Brotherhood link was used to translate Nupur Sharma’s remarks into Arabic and spread through the Brotherhood network. Interestingly, the Brotherhood is active in Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey and Pakistan, the countries which raised serious objections to the remarks.
Although the investigators are still awaiting the forensic laboratory report on the electronic devices seized from the killers and the co-conspirators, the analysis of the devices will reveal the link between the accused with Pakistan-based Dawat-e-Islami and Mumbai-based Sunni Dawat-e-Islami. Only then will the investigators be able to unravel how the entire conspiracy was hatched in India after Nupur Sharma remarks and how deep was the role of countries where Muslim Brotherhood is a dominant force.
ABOUT THE AUTHORShishir GuptaShishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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