Mumbai: The NIA on Thursday searched the house of Shamil Saquib Nachan, arrested last week in the Pune ISIS module case, near here and recovered “incriminating material” that reveals the terror organisation’s “conspiracy to disrupt peace and communal harmony in the country”, officials said.
A team of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) officials searched Nachan’s residence at Padgha in Thane district, the agency said in a statement.
Nachan, a member of ISIS’s sleeper cell, was arrested by the NIA on August 11 from his house in Padgha. He was found involved in the fabrication and testing of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and participating in IED assembly and training workshops for commission of terrorist acts, it said.
Nachan was the sixth person to be arrested in the Pune-based ISIS module case, it said.
The NIA officials searched Nachan’s residence and recovered several mobile phones, hard disks and some hand-written documents that are being examined and analysed, the central probe agency added.
“A host of incriminating material exposing the terrorist organisation’s conspiracy to disrupt peace and communal harmony in the country was seized,” it said.
Nachan had been working with the other accused persons arrested in the case – Zulfikar Ali Barodawala, Mohammed Imran Khan, Mohammed Yunus Saki, Simab Nasiruddin Kazi and Abdul Kadir Pathan – along with some other suspects, as part of a bigger conspiracy to trigger violence across various parts of the country by fabricating and exploding the IEDs, it added.
Khan and Saki were nabbed by the police in Kothrud area of Pune city last month while stealing a motorcycle, but another suspect Shahnawaz Alam managed to escape.
Investigation revealed that the duo was wanted by the NIA in a March 2022 Rajasthan terror plot case, and they were the alleged members of the Al-Sufa outfit who escaped from Ratlam after NIA made some arrests in the case.
The NIA said in its statement that investigation in the Pune ISIS module case revealed that Nachan and other members of an ISIS sleeper cell had assembled IEDs at a house in Kondhwa in Pune, where they had also organised and participated in a bomb (IED) assembly and training workshop last year.
They had even carried out a controlled explosion at this location to test an IED fabricated by them, it added.
The conspiracy was aimed at committing terrorist acts with the aim to disturb the peace and communal harmony of the country, the agency said.
The accused had plans to wage a war against the Government of India in furtherance of the ISIS agenda to spread terror and violence with the goal of establishing an Islamic State in the country, it said.
The NIA has been carrying out extensive raids across India to thwart the outfit’s terror designs and plans, the statement added.
