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........

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