Executive Summary: In the weeks following the July 13 bomb explosions in Mumbai, responsibility for the attacks has yet to be determined. Investigative agencies have not yet pinpointed a suspect nor has any terrorist group claimed the blasts as its own doing, perhaps in order to complicate the investigation or delay the process. The triple blasts, which killed 24 people and injured over one hundred, mark the first major terrorist attack in Mumbai since the November 2008 attacks orchestrated by Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

Although the population of the Maldives is one hundred per cent Muslim, mostly Sunni, and the government prohibits the practice of other religions, Maldivian society was largely moderate and tolerant until comparatively recently.1 Today, however, Islamic clerics and lay preachers disseminate a radical strain of Islam across the country, mostly in impoverished and secluded locales such as Ukulhas (in North Ari atoll).

Despite the Pakistan government’s proscription, the Islamic charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) has stepped up its overt anti-Indian and anti-Western rhetoric, holding mass protest rallies across Pakistan as its leaders continue to give provocative speeches in various public forums to fuel Jihadi sentiments and threaten Indian and Western interests in the region. The JuD is believed to act as a front organization for the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group, responsible for the 2008 assault on Mumbai.

The secret U.S. operation in Pakistan’s garrison city of Abbottabad in early May has exposed Pakistan’s terror underbelly. The operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden triggered severe international criticism against Pakistan for allegedly sheltering the al-Qaeda chief for almost six years.

In troubled Pakistan, sacred spaces such as Sufi shrines have increasingly been the target of bloody attacks by Taliban and al-Qaeda militants. The Taliban-Deobandi school of Islam perceives Sufi practices such as devotional whirling dances, the veneration of Sufi saints and other rituals as being un-Islamic and against the tenets of the religion. 

Two thousand years ago the Greeks and Romans used human and animal corpses with great effect to poison wells of drinking water. The practice of throwing the bodies of plague victims over the walls of cities was also prevalent in the past. This strategy was employed by the Tartars against the Genoese in the Crimea War in 1346. It forced the Genoese to flee immediately and the spread of the disease to Italy became inevitable.

The BioWeapons Monitor is an initiative of the BioWeapons Prevention Project (BWPP) to help monitor compliance with the international norm established primarily in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). In particular, it aims to increase transparency of activities relevant to the BWC, which the current treaty regime does not do sufficiently.

Even terrorists play pranks on WMD use these days! Late May 2008, a purported terrorist video caught media attention and some serious coverage. As per the reports, the Al Qaeda video message urged Islamic jihadists to use “biological, chemical and nuclear weapons to attack the West.” Experts suspecting the authenticity of the video message dismissed the threat as a prank and not ‘Qaedaesque’ enough to get scared.1

In Late 2009, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the radical umbrella terror group operating Pakistan, had threatened to unleash a chemical warfare against Pakistan and planned to use the age old tactics of mass disruption by poisoning Multan, Karachi and Rawalpindi water supplies. According to Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, the Taliban presently cornered in their own tribal strongholds, planning to use ‘cyanide’ and other poisonous chemical substances to the water supply lines in these cities.

Paper titled “Islamic terrorism in India: organizations, tentacles and networks” has been published in Klaus Lange (ed.), Security in South Asia: Conventional and Unconventional Studies & Comments, No. 9, December 2009, Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung, Munich.

This paper focuses on Islamic terrorism in India (overview), with particular attention to the major groups operating and perpetrating violence in the country and their operational and logistical linkages.

Here is an excerpt: