Sleuths of Uttar Pradesh’s Anti-Terrorists Squad arrested three more members of the religious conversion gang which has so far understood to have converted 1,000 non-Muslims to Islam.
Confirming these arrests on Monday, ADG (Law and Order) Prashant Kumar identified the three accused as Mannu Yadav aka Abdul Mannan, Irfan Sheikh and Rahul Bhola.
While Mannu was arrested from Gurugram in Haryana, Irfan was held from Maharashtra and Rahul from Delhi. They were arrested on the inputs extracted during interrogation of Maulana Umar Gautam and Jahengir, who were arrested by the ATS last week.
The ADG claimed that huge foreign funds were pumped into the trust accounts from overseas for religious conversion between 2010 and June 2021 and so far the ATS had unraveled that Rs 1.70 crore, in cash and cheques, were transferred into the accounts of the prime accused. Of this, Rs 50 lakhs was deposited from Dubai, Qatar, Jeddah and Abu Dhabi, he added.
The ADG said that accused Gautam transferred funds from Fatima Charitable Trust account to his family member’s account. Gautam used the account to bring money from overseas in violation of the Foreign Currency Regulation Act 2010 and the ATS was further digging deep into his financial operations, Kumar said.
During interrogation, Gautam said that he had taken one Guru to Halim Muslim College where he tried to motivate the deaf children and now the sleuths are trying to probe how Gautam used foreign funding to finance the NRC and anti-CAA protests across the country last year.
Earlier, to tighten the noose after invoking the National Security Act (NSA) against the two prime accused of religious conversion, the Enforcement Directorate filed a fresh case against them under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
A senior ED official said in Lucknow that the investigation agency had opened a case based on the ATS' FIR into the alleged conversion racket with foreign connections. The ED was looking into foreign funding and money laundering aspects of this case.
Following the arrest of two men who ran an organisation that converted deaf students and other poor people to Islam, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath issued an order under to invoke Gangster Act and National Security Act (NSA) against them.
As per the ATS, the racket involved conversion of deaf children and women to Islam. More than a dozen children from a deaf and dumb school in Noida were also converted. The two prime accused were running an outfit from Delhi's Jamia Nagar that converted physically disabled students and other poor people to Islam with funding from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Meanwhile, three residents of Firozabad district were arrested in Gujarat on charges of trying to convert a 15-year-old girl and marrying her.
The girl's father, a resident of Jaunpur district, runs a canteen in Bharuch in Gujarat, and one of the accused, Salim, was an employee there. Senior Superintendent of Police of Firozabad, Ashok Kumar said:
"The accused Salim brought the girl to Firozabad promising her treatment and changed her Hindu name to a Muslim one. Salim, aged 21 years, married the minor girl, aged 15 years. The girl's father reached Firozabad and filed a complaint after Salim did not return. Police collected information and found that Salim, along with his father Abdul Gaffar and brother-in-law Rahman, were in Bharuch.
A case was registered under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and as the girl was a minor, the prime accused along with two kin were booked under POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act, besides the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance, 2020. All three of the accused were presented before a magistrate and sent to jail."