Karnataka Chief Minister asks police to probe Al-Qaeda video’s authenticity

Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai on Thursday said he has asked the police to probe the authenticity of the video that has allegedly been released by the international terror group Al-Qaeda expressing its views on the hijab row and the Indian democracy.

These attempts were part of a sustained campaign to challenge the law of the land, disrupt peace and create confusion among people, Bommai told reporters at Mysuru airport.

The views expressed in the video, purported to be from Al-Qaeda, clearly pointed to this, the chief minister added.


An eight-minute video clip, allegedly featuring Al-Qaeda’s most wanted chief Ayman Al-Zawahiri, contains the praise of Muskan Khan, a B Com student at a Mandya college, for shouting back at a group of saffron-clad students with her own Allah-hu-Akbar chant. The burqa-clad Khan defied her hecklers while walking into the college at the height of hijab protests in February.

Her family, however, has distanced from the video, and said they were living in peace in Mandya.

Parts of Karnataka witnessed protests over a February 5 notification from the education department that asked students to wear only uniforms as prescribed by their educational institutions. A 3-judge bench of the High Court upheld the notification, last month, declaring that wearing of hijab is not an essential religious practice under the Islam.

The chief minister took a dig at Opposition leader Siddaramaiah as to why he should get worked up if Al-Qaeda was being exposed with its views on the hijab row, while reacting to the Congress leader’s comments that the video clip was a handiwork of the RSS. “It is illogical and baseless,” Bommai said.

BJP’s Karnataka unit meanwhile put out a tweet taking pot-shots at the Congress, saying the Opposition party and Al-Qaeda were together in supporting hijab in Indian schools. The question, the BJP tweeted, was which one was more dangerous.

Congress party’s state unit working president Saleem Ahmed condemned the Al-Qaeda’s views and said they don’t need any sermon from terror outfits. The organisation had no business to comment on India’s internal affairs and India was a Constitutional democracy, he said, urging the government to act ruthlessly against the invisible hands that were trying to incite communal violence to claim innocent lives.