ALAPPUZHA: “My son is innocent. The police will realise the truth soon,” says mother of Basil Shihab, 25, who was interrogated on Friday by the NIA officers in Kochi for his alleged IS links. The NIA officials had raided the house of Basil on Thursday and seized a laptop, a mobile phone, a pen drive and a few electronic gadgets. Basil was staying with his mother and grandmother at Mullassery Purayidom house, Kidangamparambu, here. His father is working abroad.
“Basil was a soft-spoken person who maintained no contacts with neighbours,” says a neighbour. After his engineering course at Anna University in Coimbatore, he was working as a trainee at a private firm at Vyttila in Kochi. A top police officer from the district said, “Basil had been under NIA surveillance for the past one week.
The NIA wanted the District Police Chief (DPC) on Thursday night to provide protection to the team for carrying out the raid on Basil’s house at Kidangamparambu. The DPC, in turn, directed the North station sub-inspector to provide security for the raid, which was carried out with the consent of the NIA court,” the officer said.