With the arrest of two accused in Lucknow, the sleuths of the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) claimed to have busted a major racket responsible for thousands of forced conversions. Those arrested are said to be having links with a prominent Muslim outfit of Lucknow.
Detailing the breakthrough in Lucknow on Monday, Additional DG (Law and order) Prashant Kumar said, “On June 3, two Muslim youths attempted to attack a priest at Delhi's Dasna temple. After they were arrested and grilled, they coughed up the names of Umar and Mufti Jahangir and took the lid off a gang converting non-Muslims into Islam in UP and elsewhere.”
The case was later handed over to the ATS, which gathered concrete evidence and registered a case against Mohammad Umar Gautam and Mufti Qazi Jahangir Alam Qasmi of Jamianagar (Delhi) under various sections of the IPC, before dropping the net on the duo.
It transpired during preliminary probe that Mohammad Umar Gautam was Shailesh Pratap Singh of Fatehpur before converting to Islam in the 1970’s. After this he was banished from his home by his father Dhanraj Singh Gautam and he went to Delhi and engaged in the conversion campaign joining hands with Mufti.
The ADG said that the accused, who were caught in the case of conversion, admitted to converting over 1000 people to Islam by priding money and false incentives of marriage and jobs.
He said that there were proofs of foreign funding by the Pakistan’s counter-espionage agency ISI and the conspiracy was hatched under the aegis of Islamic Dawah Center.
They used to get funding for this work from ISI. These people used to target deaf and dumb children and women. Converted women victim were also married off by the gang.
The racket of these people has also come to the fore in several other states. The arrested duo also campaigned in several districts of the state including Mathura and Varanasi and got people converted,” Kumar said.
Top ATS officers said that the duo used to target poor Hindus and the accused ran the organization in the name of Islamic Center. Both accused got students of a deaf and dumb school in Noida converted by luring them.
The probing ATS team seized a list of one thousand women and children from the accused of which, numerous children and women from Kanpur, Varanasi and Noida were. A child from Kanpur was taken to some city in south India and the ATS was trying to find more details about him.