Kabul airport bomber rented Delhi flat, studied engineering

Seemingly surviving on a death wish, the August 26 Kabul airport suicide bomber initially wanted to mount a spectacular attack in Delhi first where he was studying till 2017, reports senior journalist Sanjib Kr Baruah.

New Delhi: The Islamic State branch for India (Wilayat Hind) (ISWH) in the latest issue of its magazine ‘Sawt al-Hind’ (Voice of Hind), has claimed that the Kabul airport suicide bomber was arrested in New Delhi five years ago while he was on a mission to stage spectacular terror attacks seeking to ‘avenge’ Kashmir before being arrested by the Indian police and deported to Afghanistan.

The 30-something suicide bomber, ostensibly from Afghanistan’s Logar province, blew himself up near the Abbey Gate in Kabul’s Hamid Karzai airport on August 26, 2021, 11 days after the Taliban took over the capital city. He set off his explosive-laden belt about within five meters of the US troops ‘who were processing the documents of allied contractors and translators’.

Claiming that Abdur Rahman al-Logari’s suicide attack resulted in the deaths of 250 people including 13 US marines, over a dozen Taliban fighters, the terror outfit wrote on the suicide bomber in an article in the ISWH magazine: “…was arrested 5 years ago in India, when he had travelled to Delhi to carry out an istishadhi operation… in revenge for Kashmir…the brother was tested with imprisonment and was deported to Afghanistan.”

Abdur Rahman al-Logari was arrested in Delhi in September 2017 after 18-month-long surveillance was mounted on him by the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) including planting an operative who gained Abdur Rahman’s confidence by helping him take an apartment on rent in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar locality.

In Afghanistan, he was put in jail under US custody but escaped on August 14/15 when the Taliban freed prisoners from the jails.

When he was about 25 years old, Abdur Rahman had landed in Delhi on the pretext of studying engineering and also enrolled himself in a private engineering college on the Delhi-Faridabad stretch.

Investigations had revealed that Abdur Rahman had scouted several high-footfall spots in Delhi including Vasant Kunj where several malls are located for the planned suicide attack.

The Islamic State added that Abdur Rahman had “walked out” from an Afghan prison along with “a number of his brothers (IS members) as the forces of the former government fled” around August 14/15. And that as he was free, he “rushed to join his brothers (IS Khorasan province)” and enlisted in the group’s suicide bomber squad.

Strongly focused on Kashmir, the IS Khorasan province (ISK) is known to have recruited quite a few fighters from India especially from the southern part.

On March 25, 2020, an Indian suicide bomber had blown himself up inside the Dharamshala gurudwara in the Shorbazar area of central Kabul on March 25, 2020, killing 28 people.

Hailing from Kerala’s Kasargod, Mohammed Sajid Kuthirummal also known as Saji and Sajid, who later took the name of Abu Khalid al-Hindi, joined the Islamic State after flying out from Mumbai to Dubai on March 31, 2015. An ISK post claimed the attack was to “avenge the plight of oppressed Muslims in Kashmir.”

Adhering to radical Salafist-Wahhabi Islamic ideology, the Afghanistan-headquartered ISK is a self-declared ‘wilayat’ (province) under the overall control of the ‘caliphate’ of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). But perhaps realizing the distinct importance of India and Pakistan, ISK branched out to set up ‘Wilayat al-Hind’ branch for India and the ‘Wilayat Pakistan’ for Pakistan on May 10, 2019, and May 15, 2019, respectively.