Riyadh-based ‘IS recruiter’ held at Mumbai airport

LUCKNOW: A 37-year-old Riyadh-based man was arrested on Sunday morning from the Mumbai airport for allegedly radicalising youths in Uttar Pradesh and encouraging them to join the socalled Islamic State (IS).
Abu Zaid of Azamagarh district, who faced a lookout notice, was detained at the airport on Saturday night, soon after deboarding a flight from Riyadh.
DSP Anup Singh of the UP police anti-terrorism squad (ATS) flew to Mumbai on Sunday to arrest Zaid, ADG (law and order) Anand Kumar told TOI, adding that he was later brought to Lucknow on a transit remand.A police team was sent to Zaid’s house in Azamgarh.
Zaid, who had been staying in Riyadh for a year, allegedly used a highly-secure chat app, Threema, for his conversations with his targets from western UP, Kumar said. ‘Threema’ provides random IDs to users without asking them to provide a phone number or e-mail address.
Zaid was planning to launch a strike against people opposing the ‘caliphate’, such as Tarek Fateh, with the help of the radicalised youths, Kumar added.
The hunt for Zaid began in April after the arrest of four youths planning to launch terror strikes. The four came under surveillance after the National Investigation Agency arrested cleric Abdus Sami Qasmi in February 2016.
The four — Umar alias Nazim, Gazi Baba alias Zeeshan, Mufti alias Faizan and Zaqwan — were arrested from Mumbra, Jalandhar, Bijnore and Narkatiaganj, respectively. Settled in Mumbra, Umar, from Bijnore, had been trying to convince youths from his home district and adjoining ones like Shamli, Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur and Meerut to join the war against “non-believers”. Umar used to fund the other three.
After confiscating Umar’s phone and extracting his chat history, the ATS found that they had been using Threema to maintain anonymity. “We decoded the chat excerpts exchanged between Umar and Zaid. It was found that Zaid had been trying to reach out to a large number of youths through social media and sought Umar’s help to do so,” IG (ATS) Asim Arun told TOI.