Six months after it arrested the 23-year-old from Kalyan for alleged links with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Wednesday filed a charge sheet against Arif Majeed in a special court here.
The 8,000-page charge sheet includes several revelations made by Majeed while he was in the NIA’s custody and details of several other evidence.
List of 113 witnesses submitted
The NIA also submitted a separate document containing a list of witnesses in a sealed envelope to Sessions Judge Y.D. Shinde.
Sources said 113 witnesses featured on the list.
The statements of these witnesses and their testimonies also feature in the charge sheet, as does his conversation in the chat rooms and his mobile phone, besides email records. It is alleged that it was through conversations on Instant Messenger and video calling apps such as Tango and Skype that fellow engineering students from Kalyan — Fahad Shaikh, Aman Tandel and Saleem Tanki — were indoctrinated and recruited by the ISIS.
A copy of the charge sheet was handed over to Majeed, who is in judicial custody, said his lawyers.
Majeed, a civil engineering student, had gone missing along with four friends from Dudhnaka-locality in Kalyan West in May 2014. Their families filed complaints on May 27. However, it was only in June that the Kalyan police confirmed that they had registered missing person cases. The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad initially probed the matter before the case was handed over to the NIA.
The police probe revealed that the four left Mumbai on May 23 as part of a group of 22 pilgrims intending to visit religious shrines in the Middle East. On August 26, Tanki telephoned Majeed’s family and informed them that their son had died fighting for the ISIS. Shocked family members and the neighbourhood offered special prayers, Janaza-e-Gayaban, usually chanted when the body of a dead person is missing, at a local mosque.
Majeed’s father Ejaz Majeed later told the security agencies that his son had fled to Turkey after fighting for the militant group for over three months, and wanted to return to India. Majeed returned to India in November and gave a graphic account of his experiences of the civil war in Syria.
NIA officials said no fresh charge has been added in the charge sheet other than those mentioned in the initial FIR registered under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and Section 125 of the Indian Penal Code (waging war against any Asiatic country which has friendly ties with India) against Majeed and three of his friends.
