A month after 21 persons from Kerala went missing and are suspected to have joined the Islamic State in Afghanistan via Iran, both Tehran and Kabul have informed India that the group could not be located.
The immigration records of the 21 people show that all of them had flown till Tehran, Iran’s capital, before going off the radar.
“We had asked Iran and Afghanistan for information on the movement of these people. Since they travelled so far as Iran, we wanted to know their mode of journey till Afghanistan. Both countries have said they have no information,” said a senior official of the Union Home Ministry.
The Wilayat Khorasan of Islamic State came into existence in 2015. It occupies some areas in Afghanistan.
On August 23, the Home Ministry transferred the investigation to the National Investigation Agency.
The group, belonging to Kasargod and Palakkad in Kerala, left home in batches in July. One group travelled to Tehran through Muscat and the other through Dubai.
A senior NIA official said they had travelled till Iran on tourist visas. They messaged their families in July that they had reached their final destination — the Caliphate which the IS vows to establish.
“Their mode of travel from Iran is not clear. They must have taken one of the illegal routes to cross over to Afghanistan as the authorities there do not have any information on their movement,” the official said.
The NIA recently interrogated Yasmin Ahmed, a 29-year-old woman of Bihar, who was supposed to join the group in Afghanistan along with her four-year-old son. She was arrested at the IGI Airport in New Delhi in August. “Unlike other members of the group, she planned to travel to Afghanistan directly. She was to fly out of Delhi when she was arrested. We are still piecing together the evidence provided by her to know more about the other members of the group,” the official said.
Yasmin Ahmed was allegedly radicalised by her second husband Abdul Rashid of Kasaragod, who also made 18 others to join the outfit. Rashid is among the 21 missing persons, and he travelled with his wife and child.
