5 ISIS Men Remanded, Planned Blasts During Id

Five of the persons who were nabbed by the NIA yesterday on suspicion of being ISIS sympathizers were produced before the Nampally criminal court on Thursday. The court remanded them - Mohd Ibrahim Yazdani, his brother Mohd Ilias Yazdani, Habib Mohd, Mohd Irfan alias Yaqub Irfan and Abdul Bin Ahmed Almoudi alias Fahad - to judicial custody for 14 days.

The NIA officials also filed a petition before the court seeking custody of the five accused. The petition will come up for hearing before the court on Friday.

The other six of the 11 suspects taken into custody on Wednesday were let off after interrogation.

During the interrogation, the ISIS sympathizers reportedly made shocking disclosures that they had conspired with their handlers to raze police stations and hit crowded places by bomb blasts. They also revealed that they wanted to target prominent temples in the Old city as well as in Secunderabad.

The NIA inquiry revealed that the ISIS sympathizers were attempting to procure heavy ammunition and weapons for executing their plans. The Yazdani brothers were acting on the directions given by Mohammad Shafi Armar, head of Indian jihadis at the terror group's headquarters in Raqqa in Syria. The brothers are engineering graduates. The kingpin of this ISIS module Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani did his software engineering degree at Anwar-Ul-Uloom College in Vikarabad in the Ranga Reddy district, and his younger brother Ilyas Yazdani is a computer engineering graduate. The others nine members held on Wednesday are graduates, four of them in computer science.

The police confirmed that the 11 youth knew each other well, and did practice sessions at Barkas. They had planned Brussels-type destructions including suicide bombings and massive gunfire to kill the maximum possible number of people. The killings were planned at huge public gatherings during the various festivals coming up in a week or two. The incidents were planned in and around the IT corridor of Gachibowli and Hitech City, and also in Bangalore simultaneously. They organized themselves into three teams to execute their plans. By creating a destruction in the IT corridor, where global giants like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and others are based, they wanted to grab the worldwide attention.

The accused reportedly also planned to place cow and buffalo meat at the Bhagyalakshmi temple at Charminar with an aim to trigger communal violence.

A heavy security blanket was spread around the Nampally criminal courts complex on Thursday.