NIA arrests Kuwaiti IS recruiter

A Kuwaiti national, suspected to have recruited and funded Islamic State (IS) sympathisers, including four Indians, was arrested in his home country following a tip from the National Investigation Agency (NIA).

Abdulla Hadi Abdul Rehman Al Enezi, who had returned to Kuwait from Pakistan in 2013, was apprehended recently by Kuwaiti agencies after the NIA wrote to them on his possible involvement with the IS following interrogation of one Areeb Majeed from Maharashtra, who was arrested here.

Al Enezi is suspected to have sent $ 1,000 for the first batch of Indian recruits - Areeb, Fahad Sheikh, Saheem Tanki and Amand Tandel - to travel to Syria. Majeed is claimed to have told his interrogators that their handler had sent the money from Kuwait when they were stuck in Iraq in 2014.

Official sources said the information about the arrest has been conveyed by Kuwait to the NIA through the Ministry of External Affairs. Sources also said that Al Enezi has admitted to his role in arranging finance for some of the terror recruits.

An NIA team is likely to travel to Kuwait to interrogate Al Enezi.

Majeed, along with three other Kalyan-based youths, had gone to the conflict zone to join the IS in May 2014. He returned to India after six months but was arrested.

During his interrogation, sources said, Majeed revealed that he and others had first gone to Baghdad posing as religious tourists. Their travel was funded by an Afghan national. When they ran out of money in Iraq, they contacted the Afghan national who gave them Al Enezi’s contact.

The NIA has intensified its efforts to crack the IS modules in India and with the help of the police forces in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu, arrested 54 people in the past few months.