Red Fort Blast: UN Confirms Al-Qaida Link

A terrorism monitoring team of the Security Council has declared the deadly Red Fort suicide car bombing that killed 11 people the work of Al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which it warned is spreading its tentacles across the region.

The report by the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team on terrorism to the Security Council said the attack last November “was officially attributed to AQIS”.

It warned that AQIS is emerging as a decentralised terrorist organisation from a disparate group.

AQIS “continued to evolve from a fragmented group into a regional terrorist entity; it established logistics and financial networks, working in decentralised small, scattered cells instead of large units”, the report said.

It means that in a country like India where there is no scope for war-like operations, AQIS is adopting a tactic of urban guerrilla-like tactics.

The report also expressed concern that AQIS is “trying to exploit Bangladesh to establish cells there”.

Against this backdrop, the team warned that terrorist threats “intensified” in South Asia.

After the democratically elected Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was forced into exile by an uprising in which Islamist elements played a leading role, fears have mounted over terrorist groups finding a fertile ground there.

AQIS was founded in 2014 by Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The team that produced the report helps the Security Council’s sanctions committees for Al-Qaida and the Islamic State (known in short as the 1267 Committee after the resolution setting it up), and for the Taliban.

Based in New York, it comprises ten experts who track global terrorism threats from those groups and their affiliates and provide periodic reports and updates to help the committees decide on groups and individuals to be sanctioned for terrorism.

The 1267 Committee does not have a chair because Pakistan wants to lead it and some members of the Council have reservations because of Islamabad’s links to some groups sanctioned by the panel, leading to a stand-off.

In the absence of a chair, the team’s coordinator, Colin Smith, sent it directly to the Council's president in the last days of Colombia’s tenure in the chair for June.

It languished through July under the Democratic Republic of Congo’s presidency and was released recently by Denmark’s Permanent Representative Christina Markus Lassen, who assumed the rotating presidency for this month.

An earlier report by the team released in February said Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) “was reported to be linked to an attack on the Red Fort”, and the new report appears to directly pin the blame on AQIS.

According to the 1267 Committee, JeM "has had close ties" with Al-Qaida.

The Red Fort attack set a new pattern of highly qualified professionals getting involved directly in terrorism in India, as seen in the arrest of at least four doctors who were charged with involvement in the terror attack.

The suicide-bomber, who drove the explosive-laden car, was Umar-un-Nabi, an assistant professor of general medicine at a university in Faridabad.

The report included Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) attacks in Pakistan, and it said that it was restructuring and creating a new division for Kashmir and the division of Gilgit, which is under Pakistani occupation.