This is interesting from The Hindu.
NEW DELHI: Evidence is mounting that recruiters for Islamist terror groups have targeted the information technology and engineering sectors, in a successful effort to give India’s jihadist movement a quantum jump in skills and ideological focus.
Most of the 15 men arrested in Mumbai on Monday, on charges of participating in the hit-teams which planted explosives in Ahmedabad and Surat, are criminals linked to Pakistan-based ganglord Amir Raza Khan.
But three men in the group were, till their arrest, believed to be model citizens. Key among them is Mohammed Mansoor Asghar Peerbhoy, who worked as a software engineer at multinational Yahoo India.
Peerbhoy, investigators say, sent three Indian Mujahideen manifestos that were e-mailed to the media after the terror group’s bomb attacks in Ahmedabad and New Delhi.
The investigators allege that Peerbhoy was helped by Mobin Kadir Shaikh, who also worked in an information technology firm, and mechanical engineer Asif Bashiruddin Shaikh.
With a job that brought in an annual salary of over Rs. 19,00,000 a year, 31-year-old Peerbhoy is as distant as could be imagined from the madrasa-educated, no-prospects jihadist of media caricature.
His father, Asghar Peerbhoy, made a comfortable living as a wholesale fruit supplier for the Army’s Pune-based southern command. His mother recently retired after a distinguished career as teacher in a Pune college.
With its hard-earned money, the Peerbhoy family ensured that the children received the best education and career opportunities possible. One brother is a doctor, another an architect.
Police say Peerbhoy radicalised himself, not unlike Kafeel Ahmad, the Bangalore resident who became a jihadist while studying for a degree in computational fluid dynamics and died while staging a suicide attack on the Glasgow airport in August 2007. . . In essence, Peerbhoy rejected the syncretic Islam he had grown up with.