Chief of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India Safdar Nagori languishes in a jail in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, today.
After SIMI was banned by the Union government in 2001, it was Nagori who revamped the outfit and urged his cadres to take up arms in order to wage a war against the country, which he felt would become anti-Islamic in the days to come.
Nagori, who is now in his late 30s, was born in Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh. He was born into a prominent Muslim family, which was into the transportation business. Nagori joined SIMI in 1997 and took centrestage following its ban when the outfit was torn between ideologies.
It was Nagori who suggested that SIMI take the terror path following the ban and following this, there was a vertical split in the outifit.
In whatever little we have seen of Nagori, courtesy television bytes, he comes across as a soft spoken person. Even in his earlier interviews, Nagori appeared to be soft in his tone, but a hardliner when it came to expressing his views.
So what is Nagori really like? The man who has taken centrestage when it comes to waging a bloody war against India is in jail today, but according to those police officials who have interrogated him on numerous occasions, he is still a hardliner and worse, a tough nut to crack.
Investigating officers say that in short one could sum it up by saying that Nagori is a soft spoken, arrogant person who shows no remorse for his actions and to top it all he is a shrewd person who has mastered the art of dodging questions during interrogation.
Police personnel in Bengaluru and Madhya Pradesh, who have interrogated Nagori following his arrest earlier this year, say he is probably one of the toughest persons they have had to interrogate so far.
Before getting into what Nagori is like as a person, let us take a look at the ideology the man believes in.
Prior to SIMI being banned, he had said in an interview that he was very bitter being an Indian and the Ayodhya incident had left bitter memories in his mind. Further,l he had also said that he openly supported Osama Bin Laden as he had shown great character in standing up to the Americans, who according to him were the biggest terrorists in the world.
The investigating officers from Bengaluru and Madhya Pradesh told rediff.com that Nagori, although soft spoken continues to be a hardliner. Following hours of interrogation, they realised that this man spoke more about his ideologies rather than give them any clues about the agenda of his outfit.
Nagori, according to his interrogators, was trained under the Lashkar-e-Tayiba. A major part of his training involved tactics to dodge interrogation.
The investigating officers say that he hardly opened up. All he spoke about was training camps and the various outfits under SIMI, which he had floated. Investigating officers swear that he was aware that blasts would take place in Jaipur, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and New Delhi.
Not once during the interrogation did he reveal that all these blasts were planned. Instead, he spoke about the various training camps that were underway in Madhya Pradesh and its adjoining areas.
Not once did he speak about his associates or the key persons in the outfit including Addul Subhan, who according to the police, is India's most wanted today.
Interrogators say that he did manage to send them on a wild goose chase. Although we knew that he was misguiding us, we could not afford to take chances, a police official also said.
However, Nagori did ensure that the police wasted a lot of time in following his leads, while the rest of his cadres who were on the loose managed to execute four successful attacks on the nation in quick sucession.
Interrogations conducted on various other SIMI cadres had revealed that Nagori was very much part of the several meetings in which all these blasts had been planned.
Police officers say that Nagori was cool and calm, but also extremely arrogant. He never lost his temper, but his views and ideologies and his obvious hatred for the system did make him seem extremely arrogant.
His hatred towards the system was very evident in the manner in which he spoke. He showed no remorse while he spoke about his deeds and was very systematic when he answered the questions that had been posed to him.
The police say that for Nagori it was only his cause that mattered. On several occasions, he tried to explain to the police as to why he had taken up this cause and till date thinks himself to be right.
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