(This story originally appeared in on Jul 08, 2013)

NEW DELHI/PATNA: Has Bihar, a perennial transit point for terrorists to cross over to Nepal, now become an important base for them? If recent arrests and activities of Indian Mujahideen (IM) are anything to go by, the answer could be in the affirmative. Of the 14 IM operatives arrested in the past couple of years by various agencies, 13 have come from Bihar's Darbhanga district alone. There have been similar arrests from other parts of Bihar as well.Investigations by Delhi Police, which busted the Darbhanga module with half a dozen arrests in December 2011, and National Investigation Agency ( NIA) have revealed that IM's operations chief Ahmed Zara Siddibappa alias Yasin Bhatkal were working on developing a module in Bihar ever since the neutralization of the outfit 's Maharashtra and Azamgarh modules in 2008.In fact, before executing the 13/7 Mumbai blasts in 2011, Bhatkal along with his associates, including Bihar's Asadullah Akhtar, had stayed in a Darbhanga village for over a year and even tested their bombs in a mango orchard there. The group later went on to execute the August 1, 2012 Pune blasts and is also suspected to be behind the February 2013 Hyderabad blasts. Both Akhtar and Bhatkal are absconding.Those arrested include Asadullah Rehman alias Dilkash, Kafeel Ahmed, Talha Abdali alias Israr, Mohammed Tarique Anjuman, Haroon Rashid Naik, Naqi Ahmed Vasi Ahmed Sheikh, Nadeem Akhtar Ashfaque Sheikh, Mohammed Qatil Siddiqui, Gohar Aziz Khumani, Mohammed Adil, Mohammed Irshad, Gayur Ahmed Jamali, Aftab Alam alias Farooq and Danish Ansari. All were caught in the past couple of years from various places in India for alleged involvement in a string of bomb attacks.Barring Mohammed Adil, a Pakistani from Karachi, the rest are from Darbhanga. Several of these suspects are alleged to be behind the German Bakery blast in Pune in February, 2010, the Chinnaswamy Stadium blast in Bangalore (April 2010), the Jama Masjid firing that took place in Delhi in September 2010 and the July 13, 2011 blasts in Mumbai that claimed 26 lives.To recruit youths in Darbhanga, Bhatkal camped in the district as a unani doctor named Imran and tried to indoctrinate young Muslim men who came in contact with him. He also frequented a Darbhanga library where he spotted talent and recruited people.According to information with intelligence agencies, at least eight more key people from the outfit are still active and on the run. These include Yasin Bhatkal, Dr Shahnawaz, Abu Rashid, Abdus Subham Qureshi, Tehsin alias Asadullah Akhtar and Mirza Shadab Baig.Despite these realities, Bihar does not seem to have woken up to the threat. The central government had asked the state about a year back to constitute its own Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) on the pattern of Delhi and Mumbai police but the state simply sat over the proposal and no headway has been made in this direction till date.The handling of a June 22 IB input on two terrorists suspected to have entered Bihar also shows how seriously the state takes the threat. According to sources, Patna police first could not track them. After three days, when they got the hint that the men may be moving to Bodh Gaya , they merely passed on the information to Gaya police instead of the state police coming together to launch a manhunt.