Why IM's Yasin Bhatkal is a prize catch for India

New Delhi: The 2006 Mumbai train blasts, the September 2008 Delhi blasts, the 2010 Chinnaswamy stadium blast in Bangalore, 2010 Pune's German Bakery blast and the 2011 Delhi High Court blast were all allegedly the bloody handiwork of Yasin Bhatkal alias Shahrukh. Bhatkal is believed to be the founder of terror group Indian Mujahideen that has for years claimed responsibility for strikes across the nation.

Yasin picked up the suffix Bhatkal from the prosperous Karnataka town where he was born and brought up. Yasin, an MSc in computers at a Bangalore government college, took to terror along with his cousins Iqbal and Riaz Bhatkal. Both Iqbal and Riaz are now believed to be operating out of Karachi in Pakistan.

Intelligence agencies believe Riaz and Iqbal mastermind operations from outside India with their locations varying from Pakistan to Sharjah to Dubai. Yasin using his expertise in explosives and logistics to micro-manage operations in India.

The rise of the Bhatkal brothers and the Indian Mujahideen came with decline of the underworld don Dawood Ibrahim's group popularly known as the D Company.

Recruiting foot-soldiers from small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, Yasin showed his handlers in Pakistan that Indian Mujahideen was the terror group to back. Yasin was the alleged bomb-planter in the Pune German Bakery blasts along with providing explosive and logistics expertise in many other attacks.

In 2008, the police claimed to have destroyed the Indian Mujahideen arresting some 60 alleged operatives but blasts in 2010 claimed by the terror group showed that to be untrue. Intelligence agencies were further frustrated by Yasin's ability to elude arrest.

Significantly, Yasin had once slipped out of Kolkata Police's grasp with officers goofing up by arresting him only as a petty fake currency operator in 2009. He jumped bail in Kolkata and vanished.

In November 2011 too he came close to being arrested in a raid on a terror suspect in Chennai. But his run finally came to an end on August 27, 2013 when the intelligence agencies caught up with him on the Indo-Nepal border - this time, possibly for good.