Terrorism keeps evolving. And the terrorists keep improving. Earlier it was poor people, but (now) you have the educated group. Nine of the 22 arrested Indian Mujahideen were software engineers, 1 was a mechanical engineer and 1 was an MBBS. The rest were graduates or undergraduates," Maria pointed out. He later added, "These are small, close-knit cells that are hard to penetrate. You need your own people to go undercover to develop informants. The task is pretty tough."
In addition to the educated terrorist, Maria identified a new source of worry, the indoctrination that occurs in jails. Saying that this type of terrorist enters jail a petty criminal but leaves indoctrinated in jihad, Maria pointed out that "In the jails we cannot tell who they meet."
Explaining the difficulty of combating terrorism today, Mr Maria added that there was once a close nexus between terrorists and the Mumbai underworld, and that the terrorists were happy to use the readily available underworld infrastructure. But after realising that the police had informants in the underworld, they shifted their methods. Recruiters found Mumbai locals who could be easily indoctrinated and then shipped them to Pakistan and Iran for training, oftentimes through Dubai, before depositing them back in India to wreak havoc.
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