Kerala ISIS module case: 1 more arrested from Bhatkal by NIA

New Delhi: Zufri Jawhar Damudi from Bhatkal in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) recently in the Kerala ISIS module case.

An NIA official here said that the probe agency found that Jawhar was using multiple pseudo ID’s on different chat platforms to communicate with people.

The official said that he was radicalising and recruiting youths to join the group.

The arrest comes two days after the NIA arrested four persons after carrying out searches at the five locations in Jammu and Kashmir, Bengaluru and Mangaluru.

The official said that searches were conducted at the premises of the accused, who were continuously in touch with arrested accused Mohammed Ameen and his associates through various groups or channels on encrypted chat platforms and had raised funds for the furtherance of activities of the IS.

On Wednesday, the NIA during searches seized several digital devices including laptops, mobile phones, hard disk drives, pen drives, multiple SIM cards of different service providers, and incriminating documents.

“Subsequent to the searches, four accused persons associated with the IS were arrested. They have been identified as Obaid Hamid, a resident of Srinagar, Muzammil Hassan Bhat, a resident of Bandipora, Ammar Abdul Rahman, a resident of Mangaluru, and Shankar Venkatesh Perumal aka Ali Muaviya, a resident of Bengaluru.

“They were involved in raising funds and radicalising and motivating more people to join the IS,” the official had said.

The NIA had registered a suo moto case against seven known and other unknown accused persons on March 5 this year pertaining to terrorist activities of Ameen aka Abu Yahya, a resident of Kerala and his associates, who had been running various IS propaganda channels on different social media platforms such as Telegram, Hoop and Instagram for propagating its violent jihadi ideology and radicalising and recruiting new members for the module.

Earlier, the NIA had conducted searches and had arrested three accused persons, Ameen, Dr Rahees Rasheed and Mus’Hab Anwar in this case in March 2021.

The official said that during the investigation, it has been revealed that after the decline of IS in Syria/Iraq, Ameen had visited Kashmir in March 2020 for ‘Hijrah’ (religious migration) and for engaging in terrorist acts and had also raised funds in association with Kashmir based accused Mohammad Waqar Lone aka Wilson Kashmiri and his associates.

“As part of the conspiracy, funds were also transferred to Lone by the accused in the case through banking channels and digital payment methods on the directions of Ameen,” the official said.

The official said that Ameen and his associates were also radicalising gullible Muslim youths for joining jihad and unlawful activities in India and had been successful in expanding the network in Kashmir and parts of Kerala, and Karnataka.

 

-With inputs from IANS