By IANS,
New Delhi : The Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) was behind several terror attacks in India, including the serial bombings in Ahmedabad last month, the government has informed the Supreme Court while justifying a ban on the organisation.
The government made this allegation in an additional affidavit submitted to the court, detailing SIMI’s illegal and unlawful activities.
In a bulky affidavit filed to the apex court’s registry, it said SIMI was behind not only the Ahmedabad serial bombings of July 26 but almost all major terror attacks in the country, including the July 2006 serial bombings in Mumbai suburban trains and the September 2006 blasts in Malegaon town of Maharashtra.
The affidavit seeks to buttress its plea to reverse a Delhi judicial tribunal order which Aug 5 scrapped a central government notification declaring SIMI an unlawful organization under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.
The affidavit was filed by home ministry joint secretary Arun Kumar Yadav.
Accusing SIMI of being behind the Ahmedabad bombings, the central government said “this information was made available to it by the Gujarat government.”
The affidavit said that before February 2006, when the government last declared SIMI as an unlawful organization and imposed curbs on its activities, the organization and its members had been involved in 349 criminal cases.
After February 2006, SIMI activists were found involved in 60 criminal cases of heinous natures including bombing, killings, riots and waging war against the government and the state, it said.
Seeking a continued ban on SIMI, it said the central government had declared SIMI an unlawful organization on demands of several state governments.
“SIMI has extended full support to extremists and terrorists in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir and have been involved in various militant and disruptive activities in other states such as Maharashtra, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
“Further, the SIMI activists were found to have been involved in engineering communal incidents in Aurangabad and Pune in March 2001,” the affidavit said.