NIA arrests key ISIS man from Bhatkal

BENGALURU: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Friday arrested Jufri Jawhar Damudi (30), a resident of Bhatkal, in the ISIS recruitment case (RC 14/2021/NIA/DLI). He is the younger brother of Adnan Hasan Damudi, who was arrested for ISIS-related activities in 2016 and is currently under detention in a separate NIA case (RC 04/2016/NIA/DLI.) 

Adnan was deported from the UAE in January 2016 for alleged ISIS links. He was said to be close to Sultan Armar, also from Bhatkal, and chief recruiter of ISIS in India. Sultan and his sibling Shafi were close to ISIS founder Abu Baqr Al Baghdadi. They were killed fighting for ISIS in Syria and Afghanistan. The NIA registered the case on June 29 at the NIA police station, New Delhi, in connection with the conspiracy of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to “radicalise and recruit impressionable Muslim youth in India to wage violent jihad against the Indian State”, stated the NIA spokesperson. 

According to the Central counter-terrorism law enforcement agency, Jufri was in touch with the ISIS leadership, currently operating out of Af-Pak region, who provided him propaganda material and gave directions for its dissemination. “He had created multiple pseudonymous identities on encrypted chat platforms and was also a member of various online propaganda channels of ISIS. A cyber entity ‘Abu Hazir Al Badri’, a key operative of ISIS, who is involved in translation of ISIS propaganda magazine ‘Voice of Hind’ to South Indian languages, and its further dissemination, was identified as Jufri. This cyber identity was also used to radicalise and recruit people,” the NIA added. 

The agency said that ISIS terrorists operating from various conflict zones along with ISIS cadres in India have created a network by assuming pseudo-online identities, wherein ISIS-related propaganda material is disseminated for radicalising and recruiting members to the ISIS fold. On July 11, the NIA had conducted multiple searches in Jammu and Kashmir and arrested three accused persons -- Umar Nisar, Tanveer Ahmad Bhat and Rameez Ahmad Lone of Achabal in Anantnag. 

During the searches on Friday, NIA seized a large number of digital devices such as mobile phones, hard disks, SD cards etc. With Jufri’s arrest, the spotlight is back on Bhatkal, which had gained notoriety after two fugitive terrorists -- Riyaz and Iqbal Shahbandari, alias Bhatkal brothers -- founded the proscribed terrorist organisation, Indian Mujahideen (IM), and are wanted in almost all terror attacks in India in the last two decades. 

The Damudi brothers are the third set of alleged terrorist siblings after the Shahbandaris and Armar brothers, from the coastal town. Riyaz and Iqbal are holed up in Pakistan under the protection of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).