The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday said it had registered a case against nine people hailing from Kerala and Bengaluru for allegedly being involved in forcible conversion of a Gujarat-based woman and attempting to sell her off to Islamic State (IS) terrorists in Saudi Arabia.
A NIA spokesman said in a statement that the case was registered against following a complaint from the 25-year-old woman. She alleged that Muhammed Riyas Rasheed had lured her and taken objectionable pictures of her, besides illegally confining her. The accused married her through deceit by forging documents and “forcibly converted her to Islam.”
Rasheed, according to the NIA, illegally confined and threatened the woman in Kerala before taking her to Jeddah in August, 2017 for joining the IS.
Besides Rasheed, Nahas Abdulkhader and Abdul Muhasin K of Kannur (Kerala); Muhammed Nazish T K of Perigadi; Danish Najeeb, Gazila, Moin Patel and Iliyas Mohammed of Bengaluru; and Fawas Jamal of Peruvaram have been named in the FIR.
The case, originally registered in Ernakulam district of Kerala, was filed for criminal conspiracy and pursuant unlawful activities prejudicial to the maintenance of communal harmony besides wrongful confinement, extortion, rape, forgery and forceful religious conversion with the common intention of recruitment to the terrorist organisation IS.
The woman’s complaint, which forms the base of the NIA case, also alleged that the accused had coerced her to become a disciple of controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik, who has been on the run after his name surfaced during an investigation into a bomb blast case in Bangladesh.
