Lightning, thunder and a blast: On the trail of terror leader
The Sunday Times team traces the base and events which led to the Easter Sunday massacre
April 17: A man walks into the Kattankudy police station to complain that something unusual had happened on his land at Palamunai. Police visit the scene and discover a Scooty motorcycle has been blasted using explosives. It had been blasted the previous day, April 16.
April 18: A young Kattankudy woman visits her old parents living in a house in a nearby area to give them lunch. That was the last time she saw them. She assumes the father who was complaining of a leg pain, has gone, accompanied by the mother, to see a native physician in Kinniya. But he never goes anywhere without informing the daughter. This puzzles her, but on April 21, she pieces the puzzle together and real
ises her family’s involvement in the worst ever terror attack to shake this country.
April 21: Eight explosions take place in three churches, three hotels, a wayside inn and a house. Some 250 people are killed and hundreds wounded.
Hours after the blasts, a police intelligence document is circulated in the social media; it carried a warning about terrorist attacks to be carried out by Kattankudy- based National Thowheed Jamath’s Leader Zahran ‘Hashimi’.
To uncover the Kattankudy links with the events since April 16, a Sunday Times team visited the area, the home town of terrorist leader Zahran, one of the two suicide bombers who blew themselves up at the Shangri- La hotel restaurant.
The story begins in 2001. A 15-year-old boy is enrolled in Jamiathul Falah Arabic College situated on the Village Road in Kattankudy, which gets its name from the Qahtan region in Yemen. The Qahtanis who came to Sri Lanka married Tamil women and settled down here. Hence the area gets its name Qahtan- kudi or Kattankudy; ‘ Kudi’ in Tamil means a settlement.
The Arabic college, established in 1955, teaches traditional Islam as expounded by Imam Shafi, an eighth-century Gaza-born Islamic scholar hailed as Sheikh- ul- Islam. Students here memorise the Quran, the Muslim holy book. It contains 6,236 verses. Muslims believe the verses were revealed by Allah to His messenger Muhammad. Students here are taught the Arabic language, Islamic jurisprudence and Hadeeth science. Hadeeth are collections of the Prophet’s teachings. They were compiled by latter day scholars.
Zahran Cassim or Qasimi – not Hashimi, as reported in the Police intelligence report -- came from a poverty- stricken background. His father did not have a proper job. The boy was given food and lodging at the Madrasa. Sometimes, school officials had bought him clothes.
We visited the school and spoke to Vice Principal As- Sheikh Mohammed Aliyar Falahi, a product of the same school. He is also the Batticaloa District’s president of the Colombobased Jamiyathul Ulema, an umbrella organisation of Muslim scholars.
Wearing a long grey beard and clad in a white Kurta and sarong, the Sheikh meets us in the school’s library and vehemently condemns the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks as an un-Islamic barbaric act.
He says Zahran and his younger brother Zain, who was also a student in the same school, had memorised the Quran. But in the fourth academic year, Zahran, who was by then 18, started having contrary views. “Our teaching is based on the Quran and Hadeeth, but Zahran had different views. We felt he was trying to bring a ‘ Naveena Markam’ or a new religion. We wear the skull cap when we pray, but he opposed this practice. We pray 20 units of ‘ Taraweeh’ prayers during Ramadan, but he argued that we should pray only eight units,” he said.
Zahran’s revolt in 2005 came at a time when the Thowheed Jamath was spreading its tentacles to Muslim- dominated areas. However, the Thowheed ideology first made its presence felt in Sri Lanka in the mid- 1980s; some would say even decades before that. Prior to this, the Tabligh Jamath, the Jamath-e-Islami and a host of Sufi orders known as Tareeqas were popular in
Sri Lanka. While the Tabligh Jamath and the Jamath-e-Islam originated in India during the British colonial period, Tareeqas, which are centuries old, had a Middle Eastern origin and are a mystical form of Islam. Of these groups, the Jamath- e- Islam concentrates on social reforms, while the other two put their emphasis more on matters spiritual. It was to this crowded space that the Thowheed Jamath moved in. The word Thowheed refers to the belief in the oneness of Allah. Jamath means ‘a congregation.’ The irony is that every Muslim believes in the oneness of God. So every Muslim is technically ‘ thowheed’.
The Thowheed movement’s interpretation of Islam is similar to the more rigid Wahhabi- Salafi strand widely practised in Saudi Arabia. It emerged as an organised group in the mid- 2000s after the parent group led by controversial scholar P. Jainulabdeen established itself in Tamil Nadu in 2004.
The Al-Falah school’s administrative officer Moulavi Mohamed Fahim says Zahran appeared to have made contacts with some outside elements during school holidays. “We did not have a Thowheed Jamath presence here then. We found he had violated the school’s code and he was expelled.”
After the school sacked him, Zahran joined the Ibn Mas’ood Madrasa in Kurunegala – the hometown of his wife Haadiya, now 23 -- to continue his religious education. “For a while, we did not hear anything about him. Then he came back around 2008 to openly preach his version of Islam. He criticised us in his speeches and a few years later he set up a mosque. But we remained silent as we believed silence is the best reply to a fool,” Sheikh Aliyar says.
Before we visited the Jamiathul Falah Arabic College, we went to the mosque that Zahran had set up. The two- storeyed tiled complex, with a glass façade and a parapet wall, is known among the Kattankudy people as the Zahran mosque. Situated on a bylane off Beach Road, it is also the headquarters of the National Thowheed Jamath – the organisation Zahran founded. Many still believe the group was behind the Easter Sunday massacres.
We thought there would be a heavy police and military guard around it. But there was no security presence. Neither were there any signs of an angry mob attack.
We opened the mosque’s gate and went inside. There was no one inside. Some residents showed signs of uneasiness about our presence. We greeted them with “Assalamu Alaikum” and introduced ourselves as journalists from Sri Lanka’s largest selling English newspaper, the Sunday Times. They gradually opened out and began to answer our questions. We learnt that the Police and the Army had conducted a search operation in the mosque the previous day, Tuesday April 23, and questioned the moulavi. Most people said Zahran was a born orator. With his speeches, he could captivate any crowd.
We were puzzled: If the NTJ is behind the attacks, why does it still operate and why are its members not taken in?
A police source told us they have been keeping a close watch on every group in Kattankudy since religious rifts had gripped this township in the early 2000s.