The National Investigation Agency (NIA) carried out raids on Sunday at three places in Kerala and apprehended three youths for their alleged allegiance with ISIS Kasaragod module. The agency has also claimed to have seized diaries with handwritten notes in Arabic and Malayalam, DVDs of Zakir Naik besides untitled DVDs and digital devices, including mobile phones, during raids.
The agency has also recovered compact discs of religious speeches. “Digital devices will be forensically examined and analysed,” a senior IPS officer in NIA stated.
The agency has intensified generating intelligence on the ground and also its probe in wake of devastating series of bombings on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka that left more than 250 people dead and at least
500 wounded has alleged connection with a few unknown terrorists holding them in India’s southern States.
Sources said one of three suspected ISIS members apprehended is identified as Riyas Abu Bakar and he was in touch with with Abdul Rashid Abdulla, leader of the group of Keralites who travelled to Afghanistan to join ISIS in 2016. The agency not restrained themselves from revealing names of two other suspects alleged to owe allegiance with ISIS. The three suspects - two of them in Kasargod and one in Palakkad - and are currently under detention are being interrogated. “The three suspects are being questioned,” said NIA in their statement.
The agency also said they have not found anything so far to link the Kasargod module of the Islamic State to the explosions in Sr Lanka. “We are questioning them and probe in still going on,” said the officer adding that prima facie seems that they are linked with the Islamic State’s Afghanistan module.
The agency alleged that the suspects have links with accused in 2016 case in which 14 people from Kasaragod left India or their workplaces in the Middle East to to Afghanistan and Syria to join Islamic State.