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Indian Police Raid IS Cell With Links to Sri Lanka Bombing Mastermind


FILE - Shiite Muslims shout slogans and burn an effigy of the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during a protest in New Delhi, India, Friday, June 9, 2017.
FILE - Shiite Muslims shout slogans and burn an effigy of the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during a protest in New Delhi, India, Friday, June 9, 2017.

Indian police raided seven locations in the southern city of Coimbatore on Wednesday in pursuit of a suspected Islamic State cell with links to the suicide bombers who killed over 250 people in Sri Lanka in April, officials said.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) said it was questioning seven men from Coimbatore, aged between 26 and 38, on suspicion of propagating Islamic State ideology to recruit people for carrying out attacks in southern India.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the bombings in neighboring Sri Lanka and has been looking to bolster its presence in the sub-continent after being driven out of its self-styled caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Last month Islamic State claimed the establishment of a "province" in India after a clash between jihadists and security forces in the contested, northern Kashmir region.

"We had recently registered a fresh case against a new ISIS module in Coimbatore," an NIA official told Reuters, using another name for Islamic State, explaining Wednesday's raids during which a number of electronic devices were also seized.

The main accused in the case, Mohammed Azarudeen, had been Facebook friends with Zahran Hashim, the suspected mastermind of Sri Lanka's Easter Sunday bombings, NIA said in a statement.

Hashim, a radical preacher, led the National Tawheed Jamaath, one of the two local Islamist groups that were involved in the synchronised blasts in Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital, and two other towns.

The NIA, India's federal agency responsible for fighting militant groups, has conducted multiple searches in southern India this year in connection with a case concerning 15 people who apparently left the country to join Islamic State in 2016.

In late April, the NIA arrested a 29-year-old man from the southern state of Kerala for suspected involvement in a planned suicide attack.

The agency has also made more than a dozen arrests in a case involving an Islamic State-inspired group that was conspiring to carry out attacks around New Delhi.

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    Reuters

    Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.

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