Pak-Saudi links of Udaipur killers under magnifying glass
Knife-welder and main accused Riyaz Attari went to Saudi Arabia in 2019 and met a Pakistan national named Umar from Sindh. PFI member Attari had kept in touch with Umar since then.
Investigations into Udaipur savage killing of tailor Kanhiya Lal has revealed that telephone calls were made to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia via virtual proxy servers by the murderous group with Riyaz Attari in touch with a Pakistani national who he had met in Saudi Arabia. Attari, who had crafted the two knives used to hack the hapless tailor, visited Saudi Arabia after selling his land in 2019.
Killers Mohammed Riyaz Attari and Ghous Mohammad.
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The security agencies have found that a few co-conspirators had VPN on their mobile phones to hide their internet protocol (IP) address with calls being made to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan days before the savage crime. The decision to eliminate Kanhiya Lal was taken in a meeting of local Anjuman after a rally against Nupur Sharma on June 20. Although the killers went to Kanhiya Lal’s shop on June 26 to behead him for supporting Nupur Sharma, the tailor did not come to his shop.
While the forensic report of the seized electronic devices is still awaited, it has now been established that Attari met one Pakistani national Umar from Sindh during his visit to Saudi Arabia in 2019. Attari had kept in touch with the Pakistani nationals, details of whom are being ascertained. Ghous had gone to Saudi Arabia in 2013 and 2019 and to Karachi, Pakistan to attend religious discourse in Dawat-e-Islami in 2014. Both the killers were followers of Dawat-e-Islami, a movement that follows only Ahmed Raza Khan, the founder of Barelvi movement in the Indian sub-continent. Raza Khan was born in Bareilly in the 19th century. Attari had also joined the SDPI, the political arm of the rabid PFI group, in 2019.
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Interestingly, the PFI-SDFI link is common between Riyaz Attari, killers of Amravati pharmacist Umesh Kolhe and khadim of Ajmer sufi shrine Sarwar Chisti. Although PFI’s ideology is rooted in Ahle-Hadith, the extremist group has expanded its political and social agenda to become the voice of Sunni Muslims in India including Barelvi Muslims.
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Interestingly, the PFI-SDFI link is common between Riyaz Attari, killers of Amravati pharmacist Umesh Kolhe and khadim of Ajmer sufi shrine Sarwar Chisti. Although PFI’s ideology is rooted in Ahle-Hadith, the extremist group has expanded its political and social agenda to become the voice of Sunni Muslims in India including Barelvi Muslims.
Shishir 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.
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