NIA files chargesheet against Islamic State operatives in India

Six months after the National Investigation Agency (NIA) busted an Islamic State (IS) module in Uttar Pradesh’s Amroha district and arrested 10 operatives, the agency on Friday filed its chargesheet in the matter against the accused.

The NIA had registered a case in December last year against Mufti Suhail and nine others. The agency had alleged that Suhail had formed an IS module “to commit terror activities and the module is amassing weapons and explosives”. The NIA also alleged that this module was named ‘Harkat-ul-Harb-E-Islam’ (Movement for War of Islam) and it owed allegiance to the ISIS, with the aim of “wanting to establish an ISIS Caliphate in India by resorting to large scale terrorist attacks in and around the National Capital Region”.

In its charge sheet, the agency has stated that investigation has established that accused Mufti Suhail and other co-accused persons “entered into a criminal conspiracy to wage a violent jihad against the government by use of weapons and explosives to establish an ISIS Caliphate in India. The module was being guided by three ISIS handlers based abroad and it made extensive use of encrypted social media applications and chat platforms. These have been recovered from their mobile phones.”

The NIA, along with the Delhi and Uttar Pradesh police, had in December seized a large amount of explosives, weapons, ammunition, including a country-made rocket launcher, ₹7.5 lakh in cash, nearly 100 mobile phones, 135 SIM cards, laptops and memory cards.

“They were in touch with a handler abroad. The gang leader is Jaffrey Sohail who works in an Amroha mosque in Uttar Pradesh as a maulvi (cleric) and he was guiding these boys. They wanted to make several bombs, and we found 120 alarm clocks, potassium nitrate, potassium chlorate, sulphur and sugar paste,” an NIA spokesperson had said.

The agency added that the group had been in existence since September last year. The group was self-funded and its members were engineering and other graduate students from middle income families.