Hyderabad-born LeT terrorist deported to India from Saudi Arabia
Strengthening bilateral counter-terror cooperation, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday deported Hyderabad-born Mohammed Assadullah Khan alias Abu Sufiyan to India on charges of terrorism, financing the proscribed Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and planning bomb attacks in Karnataka.
Strengthening bilateral counter-terror cooperation, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday deported Hyderabad-born Mohammed Assadullah Khan alias Abu Sufiyan to India on charges of terrorism, financing the proscribed Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and planning bomb attacks in Karnataka.
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Sufiyan, on the CBI’s Interpol Red Corner notice and named in an NIA chargesheet in May 2013, was picked up by Saudi authorities last December on the basis of Intelligence Bureau inputs. His custody has been handed to the National Investigation Agency (NIA). Sufiyan’s detention was first reported by HT on October 8 this year.
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Top government sources said Sufiyan was a member of Islamic radical group Darsgah Jihad-o-Shahdat in the undivided Andhra Pradesh in the 1990s. He was close to Fasiuddin, a terrorist with deep links with Pakistan’s ISI and involved in bomb attacks and assassinations in Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh in the 1990s. Fasiuddin was killed in a police encounter in July 1993.
Sufiyan also had close links with LeT terrorist Azam Ghori, a Warangal resident radicalised in Saudi Arabia and trained in guerilla warfare in Afghanistan. Ghori was involved in political assassinations, bomb attacks and recruiting youths on behalf of the LeT in Andhra Pradesh in the late 1990s. He founded the India Muslim Mohammedi Mujahideen to target RSS activists in Hyderabad.
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Ghori was killed in a police encounter in April 2000. Apprehending police action, Sufiyan escaped to Riyadh in 2000 and joined the LeT’s Saudi cell with the motive to recruit, train and finance terrorist action in India, particularly Karnataka.
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Ghori was killed in a police encounter in April 2000. Apprehending police action, Sufiyan escaped to Riyadh in 2000 and joined the LeT’s Saudi cell with the motive to recruit, train and finance terrorist action in India, particularly Karnataka.
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Counter-terror operatives said Sufiyan was involved in the 2002 Sai Baba Temple blast in Hyderabad, whose probe has now been transferred to the NIA.
The antecedents of three more terrorists of Indian nationality, including Indian Mujahideen financier Zainul Abideen, are being verified by Riyadh before their being sent to Delhi.
“Abu Sufiyan will be able to provide the counter-terror operatives glimpses of Lashkar’s anti-Indian activities in the Middle East as well as help join the dots in terror cases from 1990 to 2014. He will also give insight into the Lashkar leadership’s plans of using countries other than Pakistan to launch attacks in India,” a senior home ministry official said.
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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