Khwaja is believed to have hired a suicide bomber to target Western tourists in Goa
Khwaja is believed to have hired a suicide bomber to target Western tourists in GoaMohammed Abdul Khwaja (30), a commander of the militant group Huji for South India who was caught by the Hyderabad Special Task Force recently, was in-charge of recruiting youth from the region and training them to be terrorists, say the police.
It is believed he wasu00a0 responsible for making Raziuddin Nasir, who was planning serial blasts in Goa, a suicide bomber.
Nasir, son of Hyderabad-based cleric Moulana Naseeruddin, has been arrested by the state police on charges of plotting a series of bomb attacks on western tourists in Goa.
According to the police, Khwaja, who is a close associate of Shahid Bilal, a Huji commander, masterminded the suicide attack on Hyderabad's Special Task Force (STF) headquarters in October 2005.
Khwaja told the police that he and his accomplices attacked the STF office to avenge the killing of Hyderabad youth Mujahid Saleem by a team of the Gujarat police in the Andhra capital in 2004.
Khwaja rose through the ranks to become a commander of the Harkat-ul-Jihadi, better known as Huji, following the death of his classmate Shahid Bilal, the mastermind of the Hyderabad twin blasts.
Educated in a convent school in Hyderabad, he is one among the many youth who took to jihad following the Gujarat riots.
Khwaja, who was working in Saudi Arabia, invited Nasir to Riyadh, from there he was sent to Pakistan with a duplicate passport for training.
Nasir returned to India after the training and was in regular touch with Khwaja while taking shelter in North Karnataka.
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He was acting as handler to Nasir giving instructions to Nasir and passing out information to his bosses in Pakistan and Bangladesh, said police officials.
"We wanted to ascertain whether Khawja had come to Chennai either to recruit or to carry out a terror activities," STF souces said.
Initially, he was very much secular in nature and had no traces of any fundamentalist behaviour.
His parents, who are residents of Moosrambagh area in Hydearbad, had sent him to a convent (St Annes Convent Scool, Hyderabad) so that he could be well educated and have a secular upbringing.
It was during his college days at Anwar-ul-Uloom Degree College did Khwaja first come in contact with Shahid Bilal. The two became the most important persons in the HuJI's south Indian network.
