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Indian security agencies on high alert after Uzbek bomber revelations

It now transpires that a Kyrgyz national was also trained along with the Russian FSB detained Uzbek Islamic State terrorist to attack India using the Moscow route. The Kyrgyz attacker abandoned the mission and returned to his country.

Published on: Aug 27, 2022, 08:48:04 IST
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The national security agencies are on high alert as pan-Islamic terrorist organizations like Islamic State and Al Qaida are trying to radicalize Muslims within and outside India to target the country in the name of blasphemy. (Also Read | Indian agencies seek access to Uzbek suicide bomber in Russian custody)

An Islamic State terrorist, who was plotting a suicide attack against a member of India's leadership for offensive comments on Prophet, was detained in Russia. (PTI)
An Islamic State terrorist, who was plotting a suicide attack against a member of India's leadership for offensive comments on Prophet, was detained in Russia. (PTI)

The security agencies are not alone in this effort as other friendly countries like US, Jordan, Russia, UAE, and Saudi Arabia are sharing footprints of Islamic radicalization in cyber-space and encrypted communications with New Delhi to prevent any untoward incident in hinterland India.

Investigations into the detention of Islamic State suicide bomber Mashrabkon Azamov by Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, has revealed that there was one more Kyrgyzstan national who was trained to target India by Islamists in Turkey along with the detained Uzbek national. It is learnt that the Kyrgyz national returned to his country from Moscow, which was the route to India being used by the two attackers. While the Indian security agencies are still awaiting the interrogation report of 30-year-old Azamov, they have sent a list of specific questions to their Russian counterparts so that the attacker could be interrogated on those lines. Indian security agencies are also in touch with their Uzbek and Kyrgyz counterparts to seek permission to join investigations.

Over the past two months, the associate intelligence agencies have been alerting their Indian counterparts over ferment within the pan-Islamist terrorist groups to target India over the insult to Prophet. Organizations like Muslim Brotherhood, which has a strong presence in Turkey, Kuwait, and Qatar, apart from the Pakistani deep state are trying to add fuel to fire by instigating radicalized elements to “teach India a lesson.” While Pakistani cadres within the Islamic State of Khorasan Province are being used by Rawalpindi to target New Delhi through Indian recruits in the Wahabbi outfit, the Muslim Brotherhood is using its links with Islamist organizations in India to engineer violence in the name of religion.

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta

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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