Mumbai: The Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad on Sunday busted two more illegal telephone exchanges, one in Latur and the other in Hyderabad, suspected of aiding international espionage by routing calls from foreign countries to Indian numbers.
The ATS, in collaboration with Latur police, had on Friday busted two such exchanges in Latur and arrested two accused in connection with the case. ATS sources said the raids were conducted based on information received from the Military Intelligence in Jammu and Kashmir, according to which Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls from Pakistan were routed to local numbers to facilitate easy communication. It is suspected that sensitive information related to the military in India could have been passed on to handlers in Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence.
An ATS officer said, “Based on the interrogation of the arrested, we learned that one of the two accused had provided a large number of SIM cards to a suspect in Hyderabad, so that he could set up a similar exchange. We conducted a raid in the Fulbaugh area in Hyderabad in collaboration with the Telangana police and arrested two persons who were running the exchange. Equipment like a laptop computer, two VoIP-GSM gateway sets and an internet broadband modem have been seized.”
The officer added that another exchange, being run on a smaller scale, was busted in Latur on Sunday night taking the number to three. Two VoIP-GSM gateway sets and 17 SIM cards were seized in the raids.
“The accused would route VoIP calls from foreign nations through local SIM cards using the VoIP-GSM gateway sets, and then forward them to the intended recipients of the calls. This helped mask the calls and pass them off as local calls, keeping them off the intelligence agency radars. The possibility that more such exchanges are being run in many other places in India cannot be denied. We are probing this further,” the officer added.
The unearthing of the exchanges has also revealed the possibility of a large number of Indian agents working for the ISI, passing on information about military movement on a regular basis. The ATS is now going through all the calls routed by the accused and identifying the users to whom the calls were routed in order to identify and apprehend the agents, said sources.
