India is likely to send a joint team of the Intelligence Bureau and the National Investigation Agency to Russia to investigate the arrested ISIS suicide bomber’s links here.
The Russian authorities briefed National Security Adviser Ajit Doval during his recent visit to Moscow on the developments linked to the arrest of the suicide bomber.
The joint team of the IB and the NIA will seek to unravel the arrested bomber’s possible links with the Indian sleeper cells that were planned to provide logistical support to him for eliminating a BJP leader over the Prophet slur.
The joint Indian team is expected to gather the details of the interrogation by Russian agencies and seek to find out if any Indian ISIS radical group is associated with the Telegram app through which the arrested radical was indoctrinated by an emir (chief) of ISIS, they said.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), sources said, is coordinating with the Indian agencies.
The joint team of the NIA and the IB will meet with Russia’s intelligence agency, Federal Security Service, and collect all information on the ISIS terrorist’s Indian links, they said.
On Monday, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) had announced that it had detained a suicide bomber, a member of the ISIS terrorist organisation, who was plotting a terrorist attack against an Indian politician for avenging the alleged insult to Prophet Muhammad.
The arrested radical Azamov Mashrabkhon is of Uzbek origin. As reported earlier by The Pioneer, the detained suicide bomber could be a member of the ISIS faction led by Gulmurad Alimof based in southern Afghanistan with cadre base of 500 mujahideens.
“Russia’s FSB identified and detained a member of the Islamic State international terrorist organisation banned in Russia, a native of a country in the Central Asian region, who planned to commit a terrorist act by blowing himself up against one of the representatives of the ruling circles of India,” the authority had said in a statement on Monday.
The detainee was recruited by one of the ISIS or Daesh’s leaders as a suicide bomber in Turkey, the statement added.
The FSB posted an interrogation video showing the suspect confessing that he was supposed to commit a terrorist act for remarks on Prophet Muhammad.
“In 2022... I flew to Russia, and from there I was to leave for India. In India I was to be met and given all the necessary things to commit an act of terrorism at the behest of the Islamic State for insulting Prophet Muhammad,” he said. The terrorist was trained in Turkey and was planning to come to India via Russia.
In Turkey, the detained terrorist was conditioned both online on Telegram and during in-person meetings in Istanbul over a span of several months from April to June, the FSB had said in its statement.
The terrorist’s “ideological indoctrination was conducted remotely via Telegram messenger accounts and during personal meetings in Istanbul with an IS representative,” the Russian Federal Security Service’s Center for Public Relations (CPR) had said.
The detained suicide bomber swore allegiance to the ISIS Emir (chief), after which he was instructed to leave for Russia, draw up the necessary documents and fly to India to commit this act of terrorism, the report said.