GUWAHATI: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has found that laptops, offered to meritorious students in Assam under a government scheme, were used by the Jamat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) operatives to spread its tentacles.
Sleuths of the agency, who came from Kolkata, recovered an unspecified number of such laptops in the state over the last few days.
“The JMB had developed its network through these laptops. The first of these laptops was recovered from a madrasa in West Bengal. Subsequently, interrogations of the arrested Jamat-ul-Mujahideen members led to the recovery of some more laptops from Assam,” an NIA source told Express on Saturday.
The police suspected that many poor students sold off these laptops in return for money.
“There are many villages which are yet to be electrified. So, as the students of these villages cannot use the laptops at home, they, perhaps, sold them off. It could also be that some poor students sold them off in return for money,” a senior police officer said.
“The Jamat-ul-Mujahideen operatives either bought them or received them through middlemen… We are probing the matter,” he added.
Students excelling in the Class X examinations are offered laptops by the state government under a scheme launched in 2005.
A total of 12,000 students had been presented laptops in the first year. Last year, 41,000 students were gifted.
The agencies learnt that arrested quack-turned-jihadi Sahanur Alam was one of the Jamat-ul-Mujahideen operatives to have used these.