Kerala: Missing youth ask parents to join him in 'sacred land of ISIS'

KOZHIKODE: While the state police and national intelligence agencies are trying hard to trace 21 missing persons from Kerala, believed to have reached an Islamic State (IS) camp somewhere in Afghanistan or Iraq, one of them has reached out to his sister. Ashfaq Majeed, a native of Padanna in Kasaragod, contacted his sister on the secure online communication platform Telegram and invited his mother, father and relatives to join him in the “sacred land of the IS.”

Cyber experts reportedly tracked the messages to Tora Bora mountain ranges of Eastern Afghanistan. His relatives said he began by asking if everybody was doing fine, and when his sister said he had made their life miserable, he got angry and started explaining about the “virtues” of the IS. The conversation ended abruptly.

Her mobile phone is now in the custody of the police. The account he used for the communication was the same he had been using earlier, police said. Earlier, another youth Mohammed Marwan, 23, also had sent a message to his family saying he had joined the IS and now he “is a terrorist,’ sources said. In a message sent in the last week of June to his family, Mr Marwan said, “People may call me a terrorist. If fighting in the path of Allah is terrorism, yes, I am a terrorist.”

Claimed to be in West Asia, he also promised to come back once he accomplished his mission. Meanwhile, the NIA team probing the IS module in Hyderabad started checking whether they received any help from the state. However, the national intelligence agencies are yet to make a breakthrough and identify the exact spot where they are holed up. Details of the missing including nine men, four of their wives, a child and an infant have already been passed on to the Iranian intelligence agencies, it is learnt.

Three of the women are pregnant, and all are in their twenties. The couples include Dr Ijaz Rahman and wife Resiala, his brother Shiaz Rahman and wife Ajmala and cousin Ashfaq Majeed and his wife. It was through Mr Rahman, a doctor by profession, that they befriended Abdullah Rasheed who was working as a purchase manager at Peace Educational Foundation.