Yasin Bhatkal: From popular student to deadly jihadi

NEW DELHI: Before his face became the most terrifying feature of CCTV footages at several blast sites, Mohammed Ahmed Siddibappa alias Yasin Bhatkal was a young man with aspirations from the coastal town of Bhatkal in Karnataka where Muslims formed the most prosperous and progressive community.


Born in 1983, Bhatkal himself came from a well-to-do Muslim family that had a flourishing business in Dubai. His father sent him to the town's elite Anjuman Hami-e-Muslimeen school and he went on to pursue higher studies in a Karnataka college where he was said to be a popular student.

However, the communal atmosphere in the country during the 90s and frequent riots in Bhatkal itself in the early part of the decade had its impact on his impressionable young mind. What acted as a catalyst to this growing sense of injustice was his proximity to fellow Bhatkal resident, Iqbal Shahbandari, a unani medicine practitioner who later went on to establish the Indian Mujahideen (IM).

The initial direction to their collective anger was provided by Students Islamic Movement of India ( SIMI) but by mid-2000 the young men had started thinking of an aggressive militant movement. Iqbal's brother Riyaz provided his house for mentoring of young educated Muslim men and planning future course of action.

Bhatkal's family was, perhaps, not very comfortable with his radicalization and even sent him to Dubai to help his father in business. But in 2007, he walked out of the family business and came back to Karnataka setting up a base in Chikmagalur where jihadist training was provided to fresh recruits complete with motivational lectures. Since then he never looked back even as his brother Abdul Samad went on to become a qualified engineer. By 2010, he had completely cut off from his family who claim they never heard from him again.

He came to the forefront of IM leadership in 2008 during the Ahmedabad blasts for which he provided explosives and took over the outfit's reigns immediately after several modules of the terror group were neutralized in 2008-09 and Riyaz and Iqbal fled to Pakistan.

So committed was Yasin that despite his name cropping up in investigations in 2008, he refused to flee and kept engineering blasts with impunity, personally planting bombs at several places.

Sources say, of late he had even stopped taking financial assistance from Pakistan and self-financed most recent blasts. "He had developed a network locally and collected funds in the name of helping Muslims displaced and affected in riots, such as those that happened in Assam last year. Some of these funds may have been diverted to terror," said a senior security establishment official.