Opinion | India Stopped An ISIS-K Bio-Terror Plot The World Needs To Talk About

In a world saturated with headlines of conflict and calamity, an extraordinary victory against terrorism has gone almost unnoticed beyond specialist circles.

Indian authorities quietly dismantled a bio-terror

plot so chilling in ambition that its success would have rewritten the story of global security. Just days ago, India’s Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) dismantled an Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) cell, the South Asian affiliate of the Islamic State preparing to unleash a mass biological terrorist attack. At its core lay ricin, a toxin so lethally efficient, one of the deadliest-known, derived from something as ordinary as the castor bean. It was a scheme as simple as it was monstrous, poisoning the essentials of life itself, and it was stopped just in time.

Its story came to light with an arrest that barely drew notice. Acting on specific intelligence, Gujarat ATS arrested Dr Ahmed Mohiyuddin Saiyed, a China-educated MBBS graduate, in Ahmedabad for his links to ISIS-K. Investigators say he had been extracting ricin from castor oil, four litres of which were recovered from his possession, and had already procured laboratory equipment and begun initial chemical processing when officers arrested him. According to police sources, his plan was as insidious as it was horrific: to poison public drinking water supplies and even food (prasad) at Hindu temples, thereby silently killing masses of civilians.

Officials estimate the plotters intended to kill “scores of people” and were aiming for catastrophic casualties. In worst-case scenarios, analysts have speculated that hundreds of thousands of lives might have been at risk, had a major water reservoir or a large temple gathering been successfully poisoned.

The ambitious reach of this foiled plot underlines why it deserves far more international attention. This was not a lone wolf or a fringe fanatic acting in isolation; it appears to have been coordinated by ISIS-K, working through educated operatives. Dr. Saiyed’s handler, Abu Khadija, was an Afghanistan-based terrorist associated with ISIS-Khorasan, and he potentially arranged arms deliveries for the cell via drones crossing the Pakistan border. Saiyed did not act alone. Two other accomplices, 20-year-old Azad Suleman Sheikh and 23-year-old Mohammad Suhail from Uttar Pradesh were arrested alongside him. These men had spent the last year conducting reconnaissance on potential targets across India, scoping out crowded public places where a poison attack could yield maximum chaos. Among the locations they surveilled were Asia’s largest wholesale produce market in Delhi (Azadpur Mandi), a bustling fruit market in Ahmedabad, and even the headquarters of RSS in Lucknow. The chosen targets, places of food, water, community life, speak volumes about the terrorist’s cruel intent to strike at the very heart of ordinary society. By targeting temple prasad (food offered to Hindu devotees) and municipal water, they aimed to turn sustenance into a weapon. The depravity is chilling.

Ricin itself is a nightmare agent. Tasteless and deadly, it is classified as a Category B bioterrorism agent under the Chemical Weapons Convention. A dose of a few milligrams can kill an adult if delivered effectively, and there is no antidote. Notably, ricin is not a typical weapon in the terrorist arsenal. It has surfaced mostly in fringe plots and isolated incidents (such as poisoned letters addressed to US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump in past years), but never before at this scale. The rarity of ricin attacks is partly why this plot is so alarming: intelligence agencies warn that ISIS and its affiliates have been actively discussing bio-terror tactics in encrypted chats, marking a strategic shift towards unconventional methods. In other words, the very fact that jihadist groups are exploring bioweapons is a worrisome evolution of terror.

Unlike bombs or guns, a biological or chemical attack can sow panic far beyond the immediate victims. It contaminates the basic trust we place in our communal resources. As one counter-terror official noted, poisoning a city’s water or food supply would not only kill people but “wreak havoc in the minds of the people”, inflicting psychological trauma on society at large. Had the ricin plot succeeded, it could have easily been one of the deadliest terror attacks in modern history, a silent mass murder stretching over days or weeks as poisoning victims fell ill, and an entire populace plunged into fear.

Thankfully, that nightmare never came to pass. Indian security forces acted on a tip and caught the plotters red-handed, seizing their cache of castor oil, weapons (including imported semi-automatic pistols), and digital evidence of their plans. The swift operation, coordinated by Gujarat ATS with central intelligence support, likely saved countless lives. It was, in effect, a major victory in the global fight against terrorism. Yet outside of India, this triumph registered barely a blip.

Global media outlets that routinely headline terror incidents offered only cursory reports, if any, on India’s ricin plot bust. Why? One reason may be that success stories simply garner less attention, when disaster is prevented, there are no dramatic visuals of carnage to propel 24/7 news coverage. A bomb that didn’t go off is often a footnote, while a bomb that explodes is breaking news. This asymmetry in coverage creates a perverse situation where we pay more heed to terrorist violence than to vigilance that averts violence.

There is also an uncomfortable truth about geographic bias. Had a quarter-million people in a Western city been in danger from a foiled bio-attack, one suspects it would dominate international headlines and talk shows. But when such a plot is foiled in India, it struggles to capture the world’s imagination. This is despite the fact that ISIS’s operations in South Asia are very much a global concern, the ISIS-K module behind the ricin plot has ties spanning Afghanistan and Pakistan, and reflects the same menace that threatens cities from London to New York. Indeed, an Indian investigation report recently pointed out how Pakistan’s intelligence service has been abetting ISIS-K’s activities, illustrating how terror networks transcend borders.

The use of a highly educated doctor as the plot’s mastermind is another sobering signal. It shatters any stereotype that terrorists are easily recognisable Jihadis; here was a man trained to heal, conspiring to poison innocents. And disturbingly, this was not an isolated case. In the very same week, Indian police in a different state arrested a pair of doctors with 350 kg of explosives and assault rifles, foiling another terror plot in the making. A worrying white-collar network of terror is emerging as a blast was recorded in Delhi, proving that radicalisation can infect the educated and privileged as easily as anyone.

These trends should alarm everyone, everywhere. It is precisely because the threat of terrorism is global that the victories against it should be global news too. The world needs to talk about how India stopped an ISIS-K bio-terror attack, because there are lessons and warnings in this episode that extend far beyond one country.

(The author is Director, research, at New Delhi-based think tank Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.)