NIA arrests Kovai man for ties with Sri Lanka Easter attack mastermind

The searches happened more than 40 days after NIA – Kochi registered a case against supporters of the terror outfit. The NIA had registered cases on May 30 against Azarudeen, 32, Akram Sindhaa, 26, Y Shiek Hidayathullah, 38, Abubacker M, 29, Sadham Hussain A, 26, Ibrahim alias Shahin Shah, 28. The other five have been asked to appear before NIA court in Kochi on Thursday.

Other members of the module have been sharing radical content attributed to Zahran Hashim over the social media, NIA said in press release on Wednesday. NIA also said that all the suspects and few others were propagating the ideology of proscribed terrorist organization IS/ Daish on social media with the intention of recruiting vulnerable youth for carrying out terrorist attacks in South India especially in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

Azarudeen’s FB page is called “Khilafah***”, through which he had been propagating the ideology of IS/ Daish. Another accused, Ibrahim @ Shahin Shah was a close associate of Riyas Abubacker, an accused in the IS Kasaragod case and had planned on carrying out terror attacks. During the searches, 14 mobile phones, 29 SIM cards, 10 pen drives, 3 laptops, 6 memory cards, 4 hard disc drives, 1 internet dongle and 13 CDs/ DVDs besides one dagger, one electric baton, 300 air-gun pellets and a large number of incriminating documents and few PFI/ SDMI pamphlets were seized.