NIA books 9 for forcible conversion of woman, bid to sell her off to ISIS

New Delhi: The NIA today said it has registered a case against nine people hailing from Kerala and Bangalore for allegedly being involved in forcible conversion of a Gujarat-based woman and attempting to sell her off to ISIS terrorists in Saudi Arabia.

A spokesman of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) said in a statement that the case was registered against the nine people following a complaint from the 25-year-old woman who alleged that Muhammed Riyas Rasheed had lured her and taken objectionable pictures of her, besides illegally confining her.

According to the NIA spokesman, the complainant also mentioned that the accused had married her through deceit by forging documents and “forcibly converted her to Islam”. Rasheed, according to the NIA, had illegally confined and threatened her in Kerala before taking her to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in August 2017 for joining terror group ISIS.

Besides Rasheed, Nahas Abdulkhader of Kannur (Kerala), Muhammed Nazish T K of Perigadi, Abdul Muhasin K of Kannur, Danish Najeeb of Bangalore, Gazila of Bangalore, Fawas Jamal of Peruvaram, Moin Patel of Bangalore and Iliyas Mohammed of Bangalore have been named in the FIR.

The case was originally registered in Ernakulam district of Kerala for criminal conspiracy and pursuant unlawful activities prejudicial to the maintenance of communal harmony besides wrongful confinement, extortion, rape, forgery and forceful religious conversion with the common intention of recruitment to the terrorist organisation ISIS.

The complaint of the woman, which forms the base of the NIA case, also alleged that the accused had coerced her to become a disciple of controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik, who has been on the run after his name surfaced during an investigation into a bomb blast case in Bangladesh.