“CONGRATULATIONS,” said the voice on the crackling phone line from Lahore, “your sons have become martyrs for the faith in Kashmir.” Ever since that January 27 call, the families of teenagers Mohammed Faseehu of Dhanbidhoo Island in Laam atoll and Shifahu Abdul Wahid of Dhiffushi Island in Kaaf atoll have been engaged in a desperate search for their children. Despite petitioning both the Maldives government and the Pakistan High Commission in Male, both families have so far drawn a blank. Of Mohamed Niaz, the Lahore-based seminary student from the Maldives who called with news of the teenagers’ death, there is no trace.
But after the September 29 Sultan Park bombing in Male, the first-ever Islamist terror strike in the Maldives, intelligence services across the world – those of India, the United States and the United Kingdom among them – have developed a new interest in the missing men. Investigators have found that the terror cell that carried out the attack had plans to execute more violent attacks in the Maldives and had a network of regional linkages supporting their project.
A rising tide of violent Islamism, the Sultan Park bombing has made clear, has begun to surge over the Maldives. Dozens of local men who fought with jehadi groups across the region have brought their wars home. Faseehu and Wahid travelled to Pakistan in March 2005 to study at a seminary in Karachi. Soon, they moved to the Jamia Salafia Islamia at Faisalabad – a seminary whose alumni include several Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders. It is a leading supplier of Salafi-sect neoconservatism to the Maldives. It now supplies terrorism too. |