Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan was detained briefly at the Los Angeles international airport on Friday morning, ostensibly as part of routine security protocols, though immigration authorities did not give any specific information. With this being the third such detention in seven years, internal security sources said a key reason why Mr Khan could be getting into the crosshairs of US immigration and customs officials is that he shares his name with an alias of terror outfit Indian Mujahideen’s former India operations chief, Yasin Bhatkal.
After the detention, Mr Khan had tweeted, “I fully understand & respect security with the way the world is, but to be detained at US immigration every damn time really, really sucks.” Khan was pulled out for extra screening. Bhatkal (33) alias Mohammed Ahmed Siddibapa Zarrar, who is a resident of Karnataka’s coastal city Bhatkal, was suspected to be involved in several serial bomb attacks since 2008, including the explosions that rocked Delhi on September 13, killing 26.
The probe into the 2008 Delhi blasts had subsequently revealed that IM’s then chief Riyaz Bhatkal had assigned co-accused Mohammed Saif and Mohammed Khalid to collect the explosives for the attack from a man known only as ‘Shah Rukh’ at Udipi in Karnataka in August 2008. Since then, the search for the elusive ‘Shah Rukh’ — touted as IM’s expert bomb-maker — expanded, keeping counter-terror agencies across the country busy till disclosures by a few arrested IM suspects revealed years later that Yasin was ‘Shah Rukh’.
Bhatkal was nabbed on August 29, 2013, with one of his associates Asadullah Akhtar, by an Indian team in Nepal and then formally arrested at the Indo-Nepal border.
On the run for more than five years, Bhatkal, who allegedly bragged about having developed IM’s “boat-shaped IED bombs” in interrogations after his arrest, had used around a dozen aliases including that of ‘Shah Rukh’ in terror attacks, said an intelligence source.
A home ministry source said, “It was suspected that in the past, whenever Shah Rukh Khan would get detained at US airports, his name’s similarity with Yasin Bhatkal’s alias was a likely reason as the latter was on Interpol’s wanted list.” But such detentions did not follow a fixed pattern, as another ministry source pointed. “Since Yasin was arrested in August 2013, with his name no longer figuring in the wanted list at international exit and ingress points, it is not clear how and why Khan got detained on Friday,” the source said.
He added, “Probably, the existing standard protocols at US airports involve extra precautions whenever the authorities come across a Muslim name... That could be due to threats from Islamic terror there since the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks and the ISIS now.”
Terror outfit Indian Mujahideen (IM)’s alleged former India chief-cum-expert bomb maker Yasin Bhatkal (33) allegedly held around a dozen aliases, including that of ‘Shah Rukh’, till he was arrested in 2013. Some of his other aliases, which were used by him to avoid detection, were Yasin Bhatkal, Imran, Asif, Mustafa, Dr Arzoo, Prince, Vinod Desai, Samir Suri, JJ and TB.
