STATE TIMES NEWS
SRINAGAR: Ten people allegedly working as ‘overground workers’ (OGWs) of the banned Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group were arrested by the State Investigation Agency (SIA), a newly carved-out wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police, officials said on Wednesday.
SIA officials conducted raids overnight at various locations in the South and Central district of Kashmir, during which the arrests were made, they said.
The SIA was constituted recently, and the agency has a mandate to investigate crimes connected with terrorism and secessionism.
The officials said the 10 people, who were working independently or as ‘sleeper cells’ of the banned terror group, were identified during a probe carried out by the SIA. Neither of them were aware about each other’s activities and were taking instructions from JeM terrorist commanders directly.
TERROR CASES: NIA searches multiple locations in J&K
Jammu: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Wednesday raided a dozen places in Jammu and Kashmir in connection with two cases, one related to the recovery of an IED and another about the recruitment of youth by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terror outfit, an official said.
The raids were carried out in coordination with the Jammu and Kashmir Police and the CRPF. They led to the recovery of incriminating materials and digital devices from the premises of the suspects in the two cases, a spokesperson of the NIA said.
Five accused people have been arrested in connection with the recovery of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) from Jammu’s Bhatindi area on June 27 last year and three of them have already been chargesheeted on December 22, 2021. Four people have been arrested in the case of radicalising, motivating and recruiting youth by the LeT that was registered last year, the spokesperson said.
The NIA said the searches were carried out in connection with the IED recovery case at nine places — two each in Srinagar and Kupwara districts and one each in Anantnag, Pulwama, Bandipora, Kulgam and Baramulla districts.
The raids were also carried out at three locations in the valley in the connection with the case pertaining to radicalising, motivating and recruiting youth to effect violent activities within and outside Jammu and Kashmir by self-styled commanders of LeT and its offshoot The Resistance Front (TRF), Sajjad Gul, Salim Rehmani alias “Abu Saad” and Saifullah Sajid Jutt, the spokesperson said.
The NIA said further investigations in both the cases are underway.
“The module, whose members were organised into sub-modules in the form of verticals so that in the event of detection of one member, the bigger network does not get compromised, had been painstakingly discovered through discreet surveillance, in which corroborative intelligence capable of being converted into admissible evidence in court was used to ascertain and confirm the JeM membership of these individuals,” one of the officials said.
Those arrested were active in recruiting young people, arranging finances, and transporting weapons in south and central Kashmir, besides providing other logistic support.
During searches, cell phones, SIM cards, records to show use of banking channels and even a dummy pistol were seized. Among those arrested is a person at whose house four terrorists were killed on April 4, 2020, the officials said.
The aim of the alleged OGWs was to work towards furthering terror activities in south and central Kashmir and were mostly recruiting vulnerable school and college-going students as a few of them are students themselves, they said.
Digital records seized from them are being sent to a forensic laboratory for evidence analysis.