The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad, during its investigations against Mumbai youth Ayaz Sultan, suspects that the same people who helped him join the Islamic State module in Afghanistan had also given him the job of recruiting others to bring along with him.
Sultan (23) went missing on October 30 last year and is suspected to have left for Kabul a day later. Further investigations indicate that he has now >joined an IS module in Kabul .
The ATS has >registered a case against him under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and is conducting further inquiries.
“We have made inquiries with several of Sultan’s friends in his locality, including Noor Mohammed and Wajid Sheikh, who had earlier gone missing but later returned. We now suspect that he was given the task of recruiting others so that they could all go to Kabul together. Investigations have indicated that he tried to brainwash at least four of his friends,” said an ATS source.
Sources said that Sultan had been displaying a radical bent of mind in his statements and online interactions for at least the last two years.
However, he started talking about actually joining the IS some four months before his departure and began trying to brainwash his friends around the same time. The ATS suspects that this is when he succeeded in contacting someone who was in a position to guide him on how to go about joining the IS, including getting a visa for Kabul from a city other than Mumbai to avoid attracting suspicion.
“This same person seems to have given Sultan the task of recruiting others for the ‘cause’. Over a period of three to four months, Sultan spoke in great detail about taking up arms for his brethren across the world. This did not go unnoticed in his locality, and he was counselled on more than one occasion by some elders in the community. It was this attention that he attracted that played a major part in deterring the others from joining him,” the source added.
The ATS is now going through Sultan’s Call Data Records (CDRs) to find out a pattern in his movements and try to pinpoint locations that he has visited frequently or numbers that he has called repeatedly, so that the people who guided him could be identified.
Attempts are also under way to trace his online movements over the last two years, said officials.
