This story is from October 20, 2014

Border madrassa on NIA radar

If the NIA had initially focused on the Simulia madrassa after the Burdwan blast, another madrassa set up by the terror module — this time in Murshidabad’s Lalgola, along the porous India-Bangladesh border — has caught the agency’s attention.
Border madrassa on NIA radar
MURSHIDABAD: If the NIA had initially focused on the Simulia madrassa after the Burdwan blast, another madrassa set up by the terror module — this time in Murshidabad’s Lalgola, along the porous India-Bangladesh border — has caught the agency’s attention.
The circumstantial similarities in the manner both madrassas had been set up has led the NIA to suspect that the terror module had become well entrenched in Bengal.

Both the madrassas are unrecognized, founded by illiterate masons, had been surviving on foreign funding, and both had recruited a significant number of girl students, said an NIA source. “Our suspicion has increased because the Lalgola madrassa — at Makimnagar — has remained shut and its founder, Mofajjul Sheikh alias Laden, has been on the run since the October 2 blast at Khagragarh,” the source said.
Mafajjul, according to investigators, had been prodded into opening the madrassa by slain militant Shakeel Ahmed. At least two of the blast accused — Abdul Hakim and his wife Amina — have spoken about their links with this madrassa, barely 8km from the India-Bangladesh border. Lalgola locals had also informed NIA after seeing Amina on TV and in newspapers that her husband — the injured eyewitness — had worked in the madrassa as a cook two years ago.
A six-member NIA team that searched this madrassa for seven-and-a-half hours on Sunday morning seized a passbook of a nationalized bank, ATM cards, bank correspondence including PINs, an empty mobile case and trunk-loads of books and papers. The investigators also questioned local Imam Abu Kasen and an unidentified person, probably Mofajjul’s neighbour.
With the NIA remaining tightlipped, TOI spoke to some local residents to gather Mafajjul’s background. The 50-year-old, locally called Laden, has a home in Makimnagar. Before that, he used to live with his in-laws in Nadia’s Debagram, where he had an iron rods supply business. He returned to Makimnagar about 10 years back and started selling eggs and trading in jute during the monsoons, it emerged.

But he was most well known for his residential madrassa, that he set up along an unfenced border. Mofajjul, said locals, had set up the madrassa at his home in 2008 with 10 students. The next year, he had enough money to buy 10 cottahs of land. Yousuf Sk had set up the sprawling Simulia madrassa in a near-similar manner. The Makimnagar madrassa was constructed in 2011. Over the next three years, girl students from Malda, Birbhum and Nadia came here quite frequently and soon there were 150 students.
In Khagragarh, the NIA officers rummaged through eight trunk-loads of papers to collect samples. The investigator also questioned the home-owner and Nurul Hasan Choudhury, the local Imam.
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