April 29, 2019:
In the backdrop of Sri Lanka’s statement that one of the suicide bombers of last Sunday’s attacks in the country had spent considerable time in India, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Sunday raided three locations in Kasaragod and Palakkad in Kerala on suspicion of youths there being in touch with an Islamic State recruiter.
The agency carried out searches at the houses of three suspects (two in Kasaragod and one in Palakkad), who are believed to have links with 20-odd youths from Kerala who had in 2016 left for Afghanistan to join the IS. Some of these youths had travelled to Sri Lanka before sneaking into Afghanistan through Iran.
“The three persons are suspected to have links with some of the accused persons in the 2016 case,” NIA IG Alok Mittal said. A source in the agency said they zeroed in on the three while monitoring online activities related to the IS. “One of the three was found to be in touch with Abdul Rashid Abdulla alias Abu Isa, a Kozhikode youth who had joined the IS in 2016. We are interrogating them on what, if anything, they were planning to do and who all they were in touch with,” a senior NIA officer said.
During its searches, the NIA claimed to have recovered several “digital devices, including mobile phones, SIM cards, memory cards, pen drives, diaries with handwritten notes in Arabic and Malayalam, DVDs of Dr Zakir Naik, besides untitled DVDs, CDs with religious speeches, books of Dr Zakir Naik and Syed Kutheb”. These would be forensically examined for extraction of data.
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