Waqar Azhar (22) was a computer engineer and a lover of Urdu poet Dr. Sir Mohammed Iqbal. He was a shy and harmless youth. His neighbour Pandit Vidyanand Sharma told that he celebrated Dasera & Diwali last year in his house. Had he been a staunch Muslim, he would not have celebrated Hindu festivals. He was so close to Sharma family that people used to think that he is the son of Vidyanand Sharma. Waqar’s father, Mr. Tasleem Raza has become the friend of Sharma since 1979. he is scrap dealer. He often used to visit Delhi in connection with his business and used to offer his prayer (Namaz) in the pooja room of the Sharma’s, setting an example of communal harmony. The Quran and the Gita were placed in the same room side by side.
Mr. Sharma refused the possibility of Waqar going astray from the religion. Waqar and Maroof met at Jaipur with a common acquaintance and developed friendship. These two youngster developed a common passion in Urdu literature, poetry and Islamic ideology. Maroof was well verse in Urdu so that his father used to feel ashamed of his knowledge in translating Quranic verses.
Maroof liked the poetry of Allama Iqbal, which he used to share with friends on Facebook. On the pressure exerted by his parents Maroof got his beard removed.
He is a computer engineering student, he was one of the four boys in his engineering college who got selected in Wipro during campus placements.
Director of the college Gaurav Bagaria, where Maroof studied, pulls out his consolidated marksheet to back his disbelief. “It is almost impossible that a bright young boy like him could have taken to such radicalism,” he says.
He further told that, remembers little of him apart from the collective request made by minority students of the college, including him, a few months ago to be allowed to go to a nearby mosque for Friday namaz.
For investigating officers, Maroof was the ideologue and had put together a small team, including Waqar and some other boys based in Sikar and Jodhpur. While there has been some talk of a plan to target Narendra Modi at an election rally, the Rajasthan Police has found no clues to more than pin a possible attack on Ganga Temple in Bharatpur byt the youths. Maroof is alleged to have confessed that he had applied for a passport so that he could go to Afghanistan for training.
Mr. Vidyanand Sharma told once I asked him to download some documents and he could not even do that. I had chided him that being a B.Tech student he did not even know this much. Police over-rated his computer skills and telling he is a computer expert.
Saif says, Waqar neither had a laptop nor even a basic smartphone. He would borrow Mehrajuddin’s laptop for infrequent visits to Facebook. The only time Waqar stood out was when he held meetings for the Tablighi Jamaat in his neighbourhood. Elders of the community were fond of him for being a visibly “good Muslim”.