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Will we be hanged or sent to life imprisonment? Udaipur killers ask

The savage Amravati and Udaipur killings reveal the level of rising Islamic radicalization in the country by extremist organization across the borders and the Middle-East.

Published on: Jul 6, 2022, 08:52:05 IST
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The brainwashed Islamist killers of the Udaipur tailor have only one fundamental question from their NIA interrogators: will we be hanged or given life imprisonment for our crime by the court? On June 28, Riyaz Attari and Ghous Mohammed enacted an ISIS-style killing on tailor Kanhaiya Lal in Udaipur for supporting Nupur Sharma.

Riyaz Attari and Ghous Mohammed, the duo who killed a tailor in Udaipur for supporting Nupur Sharma over her remarks on the Prophet.
Riyaz Attari and Ghous Mohammed, the duo who killed a tailor in Udaipur for supporting Nupur Sharma over her remarks on the Prophet.

The internal security agencies are alarmed at the level of radicalization of the killers and their accomplices as they are unrepentant about the savage crime, they committed but only worried about the punishment they will face for the murder.

The killer duo and their accomplices are currently under NIA custody even as the investigations reveal that the decision to murder Kanhaiya Lal was taken about a week before the crime with Ghous Mohammed volunteering to do the act of murder using the butcher knives crafted by welder Riyaz Attari. Both Riyaz and Ghous are Sufi Barelvi Muslims and were arrested while on their way to Ajmer Dargah to shoot a video claiming the dastardly crime.

Also Read | Udaipur killer Riyaz Attari had crafted six butcher knives

Meanwhile, the Amravati killers of pharmacist Umesh Kolhe, who was done to death again for supporting Nupur Sharma, will be handed over to NIA custody after DG (NIA) Dinkar Gupta spoke to Maharashtra DGP Rajnish Seth for completion of custody transfer. While the Amravati Police Commissioner may claim that the murder of Kolhe was shown as robbery due to the sensitive and blind nature of the case, fact is that it took local police a full week to arrest the main accused despite having two of his accomplices in custody within a couple of days of the savage crime. While the investigation is still on, links with Islamist organizations in India who are the face of banned Muslim Brotherhood have come out at a preliminary stage.

The two savage crimes within a span of a week indicate rising religious fundamentalism in India, prompted by extremist organizations across the borders in Af-Pak region. “Religious extremism is a full-fledged industry in Pakistan with these organizations not only radicalizing the entire sub-continent in the name of conservative Islam but also caring two hoots for the law of the land,” said an Indian counter-terrorism official.

As a result of the Amravati and Udaipur killings, the threat level in the country is on a high as further violence by the Barelvis in the name of supporting Nupur Sharma is not ruled out.

  • Shishir Gupta
    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.Read More