BANGALORE: A Bangalore-based software engineer arrested for his suspected terror links on Thursday is said to be a top functionary of the proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) for the last eight years।

Sources in the police told The Hindu on Friday that Mohammed Yahya Kammakutty alias Yahya Khan (32) came into contact with SIMI while he was studying at the Regional Engineering College in Kozhikode, Kerala। After completing his B.E. (Electrical) with distinction, Yahya came to Bangalore in 1996 and joined a software company. He later quit and joined a software major in Whitefield. The company reportedly dismissed him in mid-2007 after he was found downloading data that he was not supposed to, an official from the Corps of Detectives (CoD) said.

A CoD team that arrested Yahya from his house in Gurappanapalya on Bannerghatta Road on Thursday took him to Hubli। As he had been arrested in connection with a case registered in Hubli, he would be produced before the jurisdictional court there. Police are on the lookout for a few other SIMI activists, said to be his associates.

Yahya was under the surveillance of the intelligence agencies and the Bangalore police। His name had also figured during the investigations into the terrorist attack on the Indian Institute of Science in December 2005.

Sources said Yahya could be part of the network that Mohammed Asif, a final year MBBS student of KIMS in Hubli arrested recently, is suspected to be involved with.
They said Yahya had attended three meetings organised by the SIMI: two in Hubli at Mastansab Darga on Saudatti Road and at the Halligere forests on Haliyal Road in Hubli and another in Goa। Around 25 SIMI activists from Karnataka, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh had participated in the meetings.

Yahya, who is married and has children, had been living in a rented house in Gurappanapalya in MICO Layout police station limits since 2006।