Kolkata: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) Tuesday arrested three more persons from West Bengal for suspected terror links in connection with its probe into suspected terror links, taking the total number of arrests during the day to four.
Earlier in the day, the central agency had arrested Piar Mohammad Sheikh, an Imam attached to a mosque in Palishgram village under Mangalkot Police Station in East Burdwan district of West Bengal, as a suspect of having terror links.
Later, information surfaced about the arrests of three more persons for suspected terror links. The other three arrested persons have been identified as Jumman Sheikh, Shahrul Purrkait and Abdul Rafiq.
The NIA sleuths arrested Jumman Sheikh from Mithapukur, Shahrul Purrkait from Balarampur and Abdul Rafiq from Narendrapur in South 24 Parganas district.
Jumman Sheikh worked as a tailor. Abdul Rafiq, originally from Barpeta in Assam, is an active member of a Bangladesh-based satellite terror group “Purba Akash (Eastern Sky).
The arrests followed coordinated raids by different teams of the NIA, which launched simultaneous raids and search operations at different locations in West Bengal on Tuesday morning in connection with its ongoing investigation to crack the sleeper cells of an underground Bangladeshi fundamentalist-cum-militant outfit, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), in the state.
Tuesday’s raid and search operations were related to a case registered in neighboring Assam, and the NIA’s actions at five locations in West Bengal were based on specific information secured by the central agency sleuths.
Last week, the NIA sleuths arrested a youth in Assam on suspicion of being a militant. The investigators found that the arrested youth was an active member of JMB. During interrogation, he admitted that a module of a Bangladesh-based militant organisation was active in West Bengal.
His interrogation also revealed that JMB was working to create sleeper cells in West Bengal, where several youths from a particular community were being brainwashed to join that banned Bangladesh-based outfit.
The documents seized by the NIA sleuths from the youth arrested in Assam revealed further details about the active JMB module. Armed with that information, the NIA sleuths conducted raids and search operations at different locations in West Bengal since Tuesday morning.
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