Assam STF Arrests Eight Ansarullah Bangla Team Members Plotting Terror Activities, Sleeper Cells Across Country

Assam Police's Special Task Force recently arrested eight Ansarullah Bangla Team members involved in establishing sleeper cells and radicalising youth for terror operations.

New Delhi: Pakistan and Bangladesh-based jihadi fundamentalists and terrorist groups have been trying to establish sleeper cells across the country to conduct terror activities making Assam and West Bengal their bases, a senior official in the security establishment said.

Quoting interrogation reports of eight jihadis, arrested by a Special Task Force (STF) of Assam police, the official told ETV Bharat on Saturday that the accused have been assigned to set up sleeper cells across the country.

“We arrested all the eight people from Assam, West Bengal and Kerala during the intervening night of Tuesday and Wednesday,” said STF chief Partha Sarathi Mahanta to ETV Bharat.

The eight accused affiliated with Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), an affiliate of Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent, visited places in Assam, West Bengal and Kerala to recruit new members.

“They were mainly members of ABT and they were also in close contact with the top leaders of several terrorist organisations,” said Mahanta. Incriminating documents having religious and jihadi contents, mobile phones with various suspicious applications used for communicating with terrorist groups in Bangladesh and Pakistan were also recovered from their possession.

It is worth mentioning that the arrest was made under ‘Operation Praghat’, launched earlier this month. The operation was launched following inputs from central intelligence agencies and after a detailed and prolonged examination of intelligence inputs regarding anti-national activities.

Officials claimed that the accused were also planning to assassinate Hindu leaders, including leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Following the recovery of religious books with distorted versions of jihad, we believe that they were trying to include the people of some particular communities in their activities, Mahanta said.

One of the accused, Sad Radi had entered India in November under the direction of Md Farhan Israk, a close associate of Jasimuddin Rahmani (chief of Ansarullah Bangla Team), he said.

“Similar such search operations will be conducted in the coming days whenever necessary,” Mahanta said.

It is worth mentioning that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has recently arrested a member of Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) from Assam’s Goalpara district. The interrogation revealed that the JeM member was involved in online radicalisation and recruiting individuals into terrorist organisations.