India has a total of 3500 engineering colleges and 3400 polytechnics from where lakhs of students graduate every year. A large number of them are unable to get proper employment and become easy and helpless prey to various terrorist organisations and their affiliates in India. They are heavily radicalised and subjected to forceful conversion to Islam. Engineers are recruited into terror groups as they have a lot of technical skills and a vast repository of knowledge that can assist terrorists in delivering serious blows and maximum impact to their targets and evading security forces as much as possible.
In March 2022, a postgraduate engineering student from Kerela going by the name of Najeeb Al Hindi was featured by the Islamic State of Khorasan Province. Another student called Mir Anas Ali was arrested for having connections with ISIS. He was a third-year engineering student from a private college in Tamil Nadu. He was captured after a nationwide search in 29 locations by several intelligence units.
Sayyid Muhammad Haider, an electronic engineer from the Aligarh Muslim University was recruited by the clerical Abdul Rehman Khan and was sent to Saudi Arabia where he designed suicide drones and short-range missiles. He was caught in Turkey. The same cleric interacted with a Bangalore-based Doctor and revealed that his brother was used for a suicide attack in Glasgow Airport in 2007.
The drones designed by Haider were used to target Syrian Defence Forces ammunition and logistic supply lines. Fifteen to sixteen attacks occurred in a day. His aide was an aeronautical engineer from Pakistan. Ahmed Murtaza an engineer from IIT Mumbai was involved in attacking two police constables with a sickle in Goraknath Temple (Gorakhpur).
In 2021, two drones were used by terrorists in attacking the Indian Air Force Base in Jammu. Ejaz Ahmed Taufique Raza, a chemical engineer by profession was caught having links with the Jamaat Mujahideen in August 2019. The joint police team of Bihar and West Bengal Police nabbed him successfully.
Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 hijacker, was an architectural engineer. Two of the three founders of Lashkar e-Tayyaba, the Pakistani terrorist group, were professors at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore. Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group, is full of engineers. Jihad al-Bina, one of its branches, had more than 2,000 engineers in its personnel strength.
The United Nations has highlighted the potential risk of AI and smart weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. As a result of which many Western nations have maintained discreet data on students enrolling in their universities. Unfortunately, there is no such system in India, because of which enforcement agencies are in the dark about citizens switching allegiance to foreign terror groups. This is a major issue that needs to be addressed immediately.
