This took Mohammed Iqbal’s arrest in the Tamil Hizb-ut-Tahrir case in 2021, for which he was charged under multiple parts of the IPC and the UAPA.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) searched ten locations in Tamil Nadu on Sunday morning as part of their Hizb-ut-Tahrir investigation, an extremist Islamic group associated with ISIS. Two of the targeted locations were in Erode district.
The raids follow the NIA’s 2021 arrest of a man after conducting searches at multiple places in Tamil Nadu to do with with the Madurai Hizb-ut-Tahrir module case. The case was first lodged under several counts under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 13(1)(b) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, at Madurai’s Thideer Nagar police station.
Mohammed Iqbal, the main suspect in the case, reportedly used his Facebook account, “Thoonga Vizhigal Rendu is in Kazimar Street,” to post derogatory content against a certain community, urging communal strife among several religious groups.
In March 2022, the NIA filed a supplementary charge sheet against two accused: Bava Bahrudeen alias Mannai Bava, a resident of Mannargudi in Tiruvarur district, and Ziyavudeen Baqavi, a resident of Kumbakonam in Thanjavur district.
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It was found that the accused were a part of HuT. They were accused of radicalizing and recruiting naive young in order to build an Islamic State and execute a draft constitution authored by Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, the radical Islamic preacher who founded Home.
Bava Bahrudeen and Ziyavudeen Baqavi were accused of organizing recruitment meetings as well as covert seminars to indoctrinate, incite, and urge young people to strive for the establishment of an Islamic State by destroying the Indian government. They also believed planned to set up new cells in other districts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala using social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube for spreading the Building ideology.