As Intelligence agencies and the State Police are continuing their search for vital clues on the mysterious disappearance of 21 people from Kerala who are feared to have joined the Islamic State or ISIS, one of the women among the 17 persons missing from Kasaragod district has reportedly sent a voice message to her relatives saying that she was not with any extremist group but she and her husband were preparing to take up jobs.
Rifaila, wife of Ijas, a medical doctor thought to be one of the two leaders of the missing group, contacted her house at Siyarathumkandam near Neeleswaram in Kasaragod district on Sunday night through an Internet voice message saying that the stories doing the rounds in India had no connection with truth, sources said. Investigators have neither denied the report nor confirmed it.
Ijas had presumably left the country to join the ISIS in Syria or Afghanistan with Rifaila, a BDS student, and their two-year-old son. Rifaila was pregnant when she went missing, according to relatives. In the message, she said they were safe and had got an apartment to live in and both of them would be joining jobs soon.
However, she did not reveal where they presently were or from where she was sending the message. As the message was Internet-based, the investigating agencies are now said to be trying to trace the IP address from which it was sent. Relatives had informed the investigators about the message from Rifaila.
Ijas, said to one of the two main persons among those who had gone missing, Rifaila and their child were in the last group to leave India from Bangalore to Teheran, allegedly on their way to Syria to join the ISIS. Ijas’s younger brother Shihas, an MBA-holder, also had left the country with his pregnant wife, Ajmela, a
physiotherapist.
Intelligence agencies have learned that the 12 persons who have gone missing from Thrikkarippur in Kasaragod had left for Teheran in four groups from Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore. They had left the country on May 24, June 27 and 28 and July 3 using documents arranged by a Kozhikode-based travel agency, as per information received by the investigators.
A complaint has come up from Perinthalmanna in Malappuram district that a youth, who had converted into Islam, had been missing under mysterious circumstances. The youth had first gone missing on May 4, 2014 but on his return last December he had informed that he had converted and assumed the name of Abdullah and was in Yemen for religious studies.
He left home again and relatives grew anxious after the letter he sent — many parts of which were in Arabic language — had asked all family members to embrace Islam. He had also said that he had converted into Islam due to the encouragement from a Muslim class-mate. Relatives have lodged a complaint with the Malappuram district police chief.
Meanwhile, a search by the police at the house of Essah and Yahia, the Christian brothers who had converted to Islam and left the country allegedly to join the ISIS, yielded several religious texts and pamphlets in Arabic language. The police also got the bills for mobile phones and watches they had bought before leaving the country.
Essah and Yahia had left their home in Palakkad with their wives. Essah had married a Hindu girl hailing from Thiruvananthapuram who had converted into Islam and was rechristened as Fatima. Yahia’s wife was a Christian from Kochi who had embraced Islam and assumed the name of Mariyam.
At the same time, Kerala’s CPI(M) secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan said that the party had to examine the activities of Islamic preacher Zakir Naik before taking a position on him. No detailed information was available in Kerala about Naik, he said. Kodiyeri’s response came in the wake of the position taken by a section in the Muslim league supporting Naik.