The French police are likely to question an arrested Islamic State (ISIS) operative Subahani Haja Moideen, a resident of Kerala, in connection with the Paris terror attack of November, 2015 in which 129 people were killed. The NIA has found that Subahani had connections with two of the terrorists who took part in the terror attack.

According to reports, French officials may soon approach the Kerala High Court seeking permission to question Subahani, currently  lodged at the Central Prison at Viyyur, Thrissur.

The NIA is learnt to have informed the Central Government that it has no objections to the French police questioning Subahani in the prison. If the court grants the French investigator permission, they might question the arrested ISIS operative in the first week of February itself. Sources said they want to know whether Subahani had any knowledge of the ISIS plan for attacking Paris.

Subahani, a resident of Thodupuzha in Kerala, was arrested by the NIA from Kudayanallur, his ancestral place in Thirunalveli, Tamil Nadu, on October 5, 2016. He told the agency that during his stint with the ISIS in Iraq he had met two of the terrorists — Abdelhamid Abaaoud and Salah Abdelslam — who took part in the Paris terror attack.

The NIA had reportedly learned from Subahani that Abaaoud and Abdelslam were in a trainees’ group to which he was attached in Mosul, Iraq in 2015. He had never learned their real names but knew them only by pseudonyms which carried the suffix, al-Francisi. However, Subahani had identified them from the photographs the NIA officials showed him during interrogation.

Subahani told the NIA that he did not know anything about the Paris attack because he had left the ISIS camps in Iraq for India before the terror strike. Abaaoud was said to have been killed in retaliatory fire in a Paris theatre while the French police had taken Abdelslam into custody.

Though the NIA had claimed that it had arrested Subahani, a main link in the terror outfit’s recruitment network, on October 5, 2015, there were reports that he was taken into custody on October 3, immediately after the NIA arrested six suspected members of Omar al-Hindi, allegedly the Kerala module of the ISIS, from Kanakamala in Kannur and Kuttyadi in Kozhikode.

Subahani had told the investigators that he had left India for joining the terror group in April, 2015, after telling his wife and parents that he was going to perform Umrah.

He had left India for Istanbul on a visit visa through Chennai airport and from the Turkish city he sneaked into ISIS-controlled territories in Iraq along with other recruits from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

After getting trained in warfare and use of modern weapons and doing security duty for US$100 a month for some months, he decided to return to India, being unable to stand the violence and miseries of war. Though his ISIS handlers imprisoned him first, he was allowed to go back later and he reached India via Mumbai on September 22, 2015.