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Udaipur killer Riyaz Attari had crafted six butcher knives

Interrogation reveals that it was Ghous Mohammed who had volunteered to kill tailor Kanhiya Lal and used two of the six butcher knives crafted by Riyaz Attari for the crime. The four remaining knives have been recovered from local butcher Mohsin Murgewala with whom Riyaz had deposited all the six knives.

Published on: Jul 5, 2022, 10:59:31 IST
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Investigations into ISIS style Udaipur killing of tailor Kanhaiya Lal by Islamists has revealed that the two main accused, Ghous Mohammed and Riyaz Attari, had used two of the six knives crafted by the latter for committing the savage crime.

Riyaz Attari and Ghous Mohammed brandish knife with which they murdered Kanhaiya Lal. 
Riyaz Attari and Ghous Mohammed brandish knife with which they murdered Kanhaiya Lal. 

The police interrogation of the accused revealed that Attari had crafted six large knives for Bakri-Eid festival on June 9 and had left them with a local butcher named Mohsin Murgewala.

Mohsin has since been arrested by the police even as the NIA and the internal security agencies have been able to unravel the murder conspiracy including the day the decision was taken to take revenge on the hapless tailor for supporting Nupur Sharma.

On June 28, the two followers of Karachi based Dawat-e-Islami picked up two knives from Mohsin’s shop and proceeded to commit the savage crime. The remaining four knives have been recovered at the instance of Mohsin, who is part of this self-radicalized module.

While the NIA and the internal security agencies are scouring through phone records and Dawat-e-Islami WhatsApp group chats of the accused including Attari and Mohammed, they have taken expert technical support to determine whether the crime was planned locally or there was instigation from across the border. While all the accused were practitioners of Barelvi Islam, some of them were not followers of Pakistan based religious movement to propagate Quran and the Sunnah.

The June 21 killing of Umesh Kolhe in Amravati and June 28 Udaipur killing by Islamists have rudely woken up the internal security establishment as this indicates rise in religious radicalization with fundamentalists not afraid to take law in their own hands.

On Monday evening, Director General NIA Dinkar Gupta briefed Home Minister Amit Shah on both the cases and separately moves are being planned to counter religious radicalization so that such incidents are not repeated.

 
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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