As a special court on Saturday remanded ISIS recruit Arif Majeed in the NIA’s custody till December 8 to facilitate his interrogation, the NIA is now aiming to make him reveal whether he fled from the war zone on his own or was sent by the banned terror outfit on a planned mission. Majeed has reportedly shown no remorse or guilt during his interrogation by the NIA, which will now seek to unravel if the 23-year-old was allowed to leave Iraq by the terror group with a terror plot to execute in India.
Majeed was later flown from Mumbai in a special aircraft to Delhi. He has been kept in an undisclosed safe house where top Intelligence brass of the IB and RAW will quiz him. NSA Ajit Doval, himself an ace Intelligence man, is also likely to interrogate him during the remand period and subsequently, brief Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Sources said, the interrogators are handling him patiently and showing a lot of sympathy for his plight in their bid to extract as much information as possible from him.
In its remand plea in the special NIA court, the agency told the court that they want to unearth the entire conspiracy from Majeed’s ‘recruitment’ to the role played by him in the ‘war’ (for an Islamic state). The agency also told special NIA judge PR Deshmukh that three other youths, who had joined the UN-banned terror outfit, along with Majeed have been named as accused and shown as wanted in the case. “We also want to investigate the kind of training that Majeed was imparted before joining the ISIS forces,” NIA’s prosecutor told the court.
The NIA will also seek to understand the designs of ISIS, if any, in India, inter-linkages with other terror groups like the Indian Mujahideen (IM) or SIMI besides any patronage from Pakistani agencies or subversive groups, agency sources said.
India taking the Majeed instance with utmost seriousness was evident at the annual conference of police chiefs being held in Guwahati with Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and IB chief Syed Asif Ibrahim red-flagging concerns over youths getting attracted to the terror outfit and terming the return of battle-hardened jehadis to the country as a new challenge to the security agencies.
Singh expressed concern over growing use of cyberspace by anti-national forces and said that steps should be taken to monitor cyberspace. “We have to check all these forces with our might,” Singh emphasised. It is against this backdrop that the Centre is strategising ways to deradicalise the youth, especially the educated and upwardly mobile, and check the proliferation of jehadi materials through the Internet which is also a storehouse of information on arms training, explosives handling.
