Judging by Abdul Subhan Qureshi’s early CV he should be a poster boy of the new India: educated at a church school, he studied electronics and software before joining a high-tech firm in Bombay in 1996.

Instead, this is the man now being described as India’s Osama bin Laden.

Police today named Mr Qureshi, 36, as the main suspect in the multiple bombings that killed at least 24 people in popular shopping areas in Delhi on Saturday.

They also suspect that he was behind a similar attack that killed 61 in the city of Jaipur in May, and two others that killed 45 people in Bangalore and Ahmedabad in July.

And they believe that he is the one who has hacked into wireless Internet networks and used the alias “al-Arbi” to sign e-mails claiming responsibility for the attacks on behalf of a group called the Indian Mujahideen.

He also uses the aliases Tauqir Bilal and Qasim and has become adept at changing his appearance, according to police and Intelligence Bureau officers.

Investigators still believe that the Indian Mujahideen is a front for the banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which has been blamed for many other attacks.

What is new is the suggestion that Mr Qureshi masterminded the recent bombings, rather than the Pakistani or Bangladeshi radicals previously thought to be behind SIMI.

“Finding Qureshi … could prove key to preventing the next big terror bombings. But the threat will not end with his arrest,” Praveen Swami, an expert on Islamic extremism in India, wrote in a profile of Mr Qureshi.

“Investigations of other SIMI-linked terror cells have thrown up evidence which suggests Qureshi trained several hundred recent recruits … at camps held across India from 2007 onwards.”

Mr Qureshi’s alleged role is all the more troubling as he does not fit the conventional profile of Islamic extremists in India: unlike many of its 151 million Muslims, he had education and economic opportunities.

His parents came from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh – India’s poorest and most populous – but migrated to Bombay and sent him to Antonio De Souza High School, a church-run institution catering to all major religions.

He graduated from there in 1988, earned a diploma in industrial electronics in 1995 and a specialised software maintenance qualification in 1996 before joining a computer firm later that year.

After handling several major projects, he moved to a larger computer company.

In March 2001, however, he quit suddenly, saying in a letter: “I wish to inform you that I have decided to devote one complete year to pursue religious and spiritual matters.” Police now believe that Mr Qureshi joined SIMI as early as 1998 and helped to organise its conferences in 1999 and 2001 before going underground after the group was banned later that year.

They are unclear about what he did over the next seven years, but say that SIMI members arrested after the May and July bombings have told them that he masterminded the attacks and sent the e-mails.

Police also say that Mr Qureshi was in Delhi between August 23 and 25, but the e-mail about Saturday’s blasts appears to have been sent from a wireless network in Bombay, where the Anti-Terror Squad is now searching for him.

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