KOLKATA: The West Bengal Criminal Investigation Department (CID) on Tuesday arrested an alleged ISIS recruiter while he was returning to his village in Birbhum district from Chennai.
Mohammad Moshiruddin alias Musha, 25, currently a resident of Tirupur in Tamil Nadu, was detained at Burdwan station on Monday night following a tip-off, a CID official said. A sharp weapon, a firearm and other ammunition, six SIM cards, and two fake voter ID cards were seized from him.
Musha was working at a grocery shop in Tirupur and was living there with his wife and two children. Intelligence sources from Coimbatore said he had been under the state police’s scanner since April 2016. He is not believed to have travelled abroad, but police think he could have been indoctrinated online.
His mobile phone records indicated that he used high-tech software, had made calls to Syria and Afghanistan, and was in touch with Safwi Armar, an ISIS leader said to be in charge on India, the official claimed. He was entrusted to start a module in Birbhum district, the official said. After primary interrogation, he was taken to some places in Birbhum and then brought to the Criminal Investigation Department headquarters at Bhabani Bhavan here, the official said and added that the IB and the NIA had also joined the investigation. Musha had used coded messages, and CID’s software experts were decoding it, the official said. Further interrogation was on to find out his contacts in West Bengal.
After last week’s attack in Dhaka by ISIS terrorists, central investigative agencies apprehend attacks in West Bengal too as the ISIS and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JuMB) might be having sleeper cells in the state.
After the blast at Khagragarh in Burdwan district on October 2, 2014 in which JuMB terrorists were involved, the NIA arrested several of them from various parts of the state including Birbhum from where President Pranab Mukherjee hails. In December 2014 Mehdi Masroor Biswas, an electrical engineer from Birbhum was arrested in Bangalore and later taken into NIA custody as he was tweeting to recruit for the ISIS. Biswas hails from an affluent family.