MUMBAI: Saquib Abdul Hamid Nachan, terror suspect from Padgha on the outskirts of Mumbai, died in a Delhi hospital on Saturday. Nachan was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for his alleged links to the banned Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in December 2023, along with 15 other alleged ISIS members. They were picked up by the federal investigating agency during searches in Padgha, a village in Thane district, as part of a nationwide crackdown on ISIS.
Nachan had been lodged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail but suffered a stroke on Tuesday, when was admitted to Deendayal Upadhyay Hospital for treatment. He was shifted to Safdarjung Hospital on Wednesday. Nachan’s lawyer Samsher Ansari said doctors declared him dead at around 11.30am on Saturday.
NIA officials claim Nachan had suffered strokes twice before. Ansari said jail authorities informed the family on Monday and he, along with Nachan’s elder son, rushed to Delhi. He filed an application in the Patiala House Courts so that his client could be shifted to a facility where he could receive specialised treatment.
The 67-year-old terror suspect, an alleged key ISIS operative in Maharashtra, was a former office-bearer of the banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). Over the years, he has been linked to various terror outfits and convicted in several terror cases. He also served a ten-year prison sentence for the series of bomb blasts at railway stations in Mumbai in 2002-03, which killed more than ten people.
According to the NIA, Nachan was recruiting impressionable Muslim youth to become hardline extremists. He had declared Padgha village a “liberated zone” and encouraged youth to relocate to the village, where they were allegedly trained to wage war against the Indian state. The NIA says Nachan was the self-declared leader of these youth and administered bayath (oath of allegiance to the Khalifa of ISIS) to people joining the ISIS module in Padgha.
In December 2023, NIA conducted searches at 44 locations in Maharashtra and Karnataka, in a joint operation with the Anti-Terror Squad. They claimed to have found weapons, cash and Hamas flags in Padgha, Kalyan, Mira Road and Pune, and in some places in Bengaluru.
The accused, the NIA had said, were operating on the directions of foreign handlers and had been involved in terrorist activities, including the manufacture of improvised explosive devices IEDs), to further the violent agenda of ISIS.