Two youths from Kerala who have reportedly been missing from the state for some time and were suspected to have joined the Islamic State (IS) have been traced to Tirupur in Tamil Nadu, police on Thursday said to Deccan Chronicle.
However, a preliminary enquiry showed no evidence to suggest that the two, who had left their homes after a quarrel with their parents, were trying to join IS.
Kerala Police personnel had arrived in Tirupur some days ago to enquire about the youths. They found that Mohammed and Shabbir from Malampuzha had come to Tirupur after a quarrel with their parents and landed jobs in a garment factory, they said.
Notably, a suspected IS activist was arrested in West Bengal a week ago. He had stayed in Tirupur for some time. The two youths from Kerala were taken back early this morning.
A week ago on Tuesday, the West Bengal Criminal Investigation Department (CID) arrested an alleged ISIS recruiter while he was returning to his village in Birbhum district from Chennai.
Mohammad Moshiruddin alias Musha (25), currently a resident of Tirupur in Tamil Nadu, was detained at Burdwan station on Monday night following a tip-off, a CID official said. A sharp weapon, a firearm and other ammunition, six SIM cards, and two fake voter ID cards were seized from him.
Musha was working at a grocery shop in Tirupur and was living there with his wife and two children. Intelligence sources from Coimbatore said he had been under the state police’s scanner since April 2016. He is not believed to have travelled abroad, but police think he could have been indoctrinated online.
His mobile phone records indicated that he used high-tech software, had made calls to Syria and Afghanistan, and was in touch with Safwi Armar, an ISIS leader said to be in charge of India, the official claimed. He was entrusted to start a module in Birbhum district. Musha had used coded messages, and CID’s software experts were decoding it, the official said. Further interrogation was on to find out his contacts in West Bengal.
After last week’s attack in Dhaka by ISIS terrorists, central investigative agencies are apprehensive about attacks in West Bengal too as the ISIS and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JuMB) might have sleeper cells in the state.
In December 2014, Mehdi Masroor Biswas, an electrical engineer from Birbhum was arrested in Bangalore and later taken into NIA custody as he was tweeting to recruit for the ISIS.
In January this year, the NIA arrested 13 suspected ISIS sympathisers for plotting attacks in different parts of the country.
The arrests were made following simultaneous searches and raids conducted at 12 locations in six cities–Bangalore, Tumkur, Mangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Lucknow with the support of local police.
All the arrested suspects were brought to the national capital for detailed interrogation as a preliminary enquiry indicated that they were working on evolving a terror outfit with ideologies similar to ISIS.
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