When Abdus Subhan Qureshi sent terror e-mails?

Indian Mujahideen’s suspected mastermind Abdus Subhan Qureshi, who is believed to have authored the five terror e-mails sent to the media before or after five terror attacks in the past 10 months, might have earned a grudging acknowledgement as an effective prose communicator, but he is apparently not shy of plagiarising either.

Senior Intelligence Bureau officers involved in the task of analysing the IM’s Saturday e-mail have stumbled upon a surprising fact: Qureshi, the suspected author of the e-mail, had used paragraphs that were plagiarised — at times word-by-word — from an article published a over a week ago on a popular website, www.thehoot.org, which reviews media across the subcontinent.

It has led the IB to suspect that “Qureshi might have ‘friends/contacts’ in the media who have been helping him to compose his terror rhetoric as contained in the e-mails since the website is usually only accessed by media professionals and not the laymen. Such a man could have told him about this website’s article for use,” said an IB officer.

Several state anti-terror agencies, on cue from the IB, are currently involved in attempting to zero in on the suspected “media contacts” of Qureshi, if any. They already have a few suspects in the scanner, including a man working in the electronic media.

Investigators also suspect that Qureshi might be taking help from others to compose e-mails that have increasingly been using impeccable English — with few or no grammatical, punctuation errors.

The ‘plagiarised’ article had appeared titled ‘Bombs defused in newsrooms’ on September 5 on the website.

HT tried to speak to Sevanti Ninan, who runs the website, but she was not in the city and her cellphone was not reachable.