Slain terror suspect was self-radicalised
lucknow — Police on Wednesday shot dead a self-radicalised Daesh sympathiser who they said was involved in a train explosion that injured 10 people.
Police said they ended a nearly 12-hour stand-off in the early hours by storming the house where the suspect, identified as Saifullah, was holed up in northern Uttar Pradesh state.
“When we entered the room, he fired upon us and we also retaliated. About four to five bullets hit him and then Saifullah died,” Aseem Arun of India’s anti-terror squad said.
Police have made several arrests over the train explosion on Tuesday in which at least 10 people were injured, and are pursuing other suspects.
Closed-circuit television footage from near the train explosion site in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh state helped police identify the suspects. Police recovered eight pistols and more than 600 rounds of ammunition, explosives, gold and passports from the house, on the outskirts of state capital Lucknow.
Television footage showed police carrying a body wrapped in a white sheet from the house.
Senior police official Daljit Singh Chaudhary said there was no evidence the suspects had any direct connection with Daesh, but had become radicalised online.
“There is no evidence of any outside funding or any external support. They were self reliant,” he told reporters in Lucknow.
Leaders say the Daesh group does not have influence in the country of over 1.2 billion people, which has a large but traditionally moderate Muslim population.
There have been some reports of Indians going to fight for the group in Iraq and Syria, but the numbers are low relative to the size of the population.
Meanwhile, Union minister Subhash Bhamre said India has been dealing with terror attacks for long and is capable of tackling incidents like the one in Lucknow where a suspected Daesh terrorist was killed. “We have been dealing with terrorist activities and all our agencies are very alert. We are capable of tackling these,” Bhamre, who is the Minister of State for Defence, said here.
On the killing of a suspected Daesh terrorist in Lucknow, Bhamre said terror, including theDaesh, is a global phenomenon and this “menace” is to be tackled unitedly.—