Kerala has been put on high alert and the police have upped the ante against possible extremist activity in the state in the wake of the Sri Lanka serial blasts.
Representational Image (Photo: Getty Images)
Muslim Education Society (MES) in Kerala has issued circular banning girl students from covering their faces in colleges from the new academic year.
The development comes days after Sri Lanka issued a Presidential decree banning all forms of face covers including Islamic garments such as burqa in the wake of the April 21 serial blasts.
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The influential All Ceylon Jamiyyathul Ulama too had asked women to avoid wearing a burqa or niqab in order to help security forces.
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Following the blasts that killed 253 people, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) conducted raids at three places at Kasaragod and Palakkad in Kerala in a probe connected to an Islamic State module case.
Kerala has been put on high alert and the police have upped the ante against possible extremist activity in the state.
Senior officers of the NIA had visited several places in Kerala as part of their sweeping probe against Zahran Hashim, the head of relatively unknown National Thowheeth Jamaath — an affiliate of the ISIS which carried out the Sri Lanka blasts — as part of its investigation into his links in India.
Hashim was confirmed to have been killed in the attack on a Colombo hotel on Easter Sunday.
Following the raids, the NIA had picked up Riyas Aboobacker or Abu Dujana, a resident of Palakkad, who admitted that he wanted to carry out a suicide attack in Kerala.
Aboobacker, 29, revealed that he has been following speeches and videos of Hashim for more than a year besides those of controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik. Aboobacker also said that he has been in online contact with absconding accused Abdul Rashid Abdulla aka Abu Isa and Abdul Khayoom aka Abu Khalid (accused in Valapattanam ISIS case), who is believed to be in Syria.
The NIA is probing the disappearance of 21 people from the state in May 2016. They are believed to have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the barbaric terror group.
While 17 of them were from Kasargod, four were from Palakkad. Among them were six women and children.
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