In September 2006 in Malegaon, three IEDs had exploded just after Friday prayers outside a Muslim cemetery close to a mosque, Hamidiya Masjid, on the occasion of Shab-e-Barat, causing deaths and a deadly stampede. Thirty-seven had died and 125 sustained injuries.

In May 2007, an RDX-based IED device had exploded at Hyderabad’s historic Mecca Masjid, a seventeenth-century mosque in the old city, during the Friday afternoon prayers. The IED was placed near the Wazoo Khana, where the faithful perform ablutions. Nine had died in the blast, another five had died in police firing after riots broke out on the streets following the blast, which had occurred at a time when 10,000 people were gathered in the mosque.

Then in November 2007, synchronized serial blasts had ripped through the premises of the Varanasi civil court, the Faizabad district court and a Lucknow court, targeting lawyers. Six bombs had gone off in all, while an unexploded one was discovered. The blasts killed eighteen people while eighty-one sustained injuries.

After these blasts, for the first time since the Dashashwamedh Ghat one, a claim emerged to own up even as it offered a defence for the attacks, using a complex narrative of religious and social issues to justify them as valid retaliation in response to the perceived wrongs done to the Muslim community.

An email, ostensibly in the name of the unknown ‘Al-Hind Mujahideen’ was sent to a few news channels from the account of ‘[email protected]’. It talked of the alleged ‘wounds inflicted by the idol worshippers’, the December 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid and the 2002 riots in Gujarat. It was suspected that the outfit was old wine in a new bottle, which drew elements from the LeT and HuJI and hoped to provide adequate deniability to the ISI and its puppets in the LeT, JeM and a radical Muslim students’ body that was proscribed in the early 2000s.

But who were the members of the Al-Hind Mujahideen and who were part of its leadership? Who trained its men, financed them, and provided weapons and explosives to them? Were they answerable to the ISI or the LeT/HuJI? There were many queries but no clear answers.

The Al-Hind Mujahideen would reinvent itself as ‘Indian Mujahideen’ (IM), vowing to shed more blood of the ‘infidels’, taunting and ridiculing India’s intelligence, counter-intelligence and police agencies after orchestrating a series of synchronized blasts in India in 2008. These included nine serial blasts in Jaipur in May (sixty-three killed), twenty-two blasts within ninety minutes in seventeen locations in Ahmedabad in July (fifty-six dead), nine in Bangalore also in July (one dead) and nine in Delhi in September (twenty killed). The arrest of an accused in the Ahmedabad blasts, Anwar Shaukat Basheerpuri, threw some light on who constituted the Indian Mujahideen.