10 Jaish-e-Mohammad over-ground workers arrested by State Investigation Agency in Kashmir

The newly formed State Investigation Agency (SIA) of Jammu and Kashmir police Wednesday arrested ten over-ground workers (OGWs) of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad militant outfit during multiple raids across the Valley.

A spokesperson of the SIA said the raids were “primarily focused on the network” of the Jaish, saying “ten identified persons who were part of OGW modules and taking instructions from Jaish terrorist commanders have been arrested.”

The police categorize “anybody who supports the militants” as an OGW. A person providing a safe house, passage, information or acting as a messenger for suspected militants automatically comes under the radar of the police as an OGW.

“The module whose members were organised into sub-modules, in the form of verticals, so that in the event of detection of one member the bigger network does not get compromised had been painstakingly discovered through discreet surveillance in which corroborative intelligence capable of being converted to admissible evidence in court was used to ascertain and confirm the Jaish OGW membership of the individuals,” the SIA spokesperson said.

“The module could be connected to other modules through higher levels of Jaish leadership. Their discovery is likely as the investigation rolls out in coming days,” he added.

The SIA said the “detected portion of the module had been active in recruiting other young persons, arranging finances, transporting weapons in south and central Kashmir besides providing other logistic support.”

The SIA was constituted by the J&K government last year in November on the lines of National Investigation Agency (NIA), to handle most high-profile terror cases in the Union Territory (UT).

“In the searches, besides arrests, cell phones, SIM cards, records to show the use of banking channels and even a dummy pistol were seized. Among arrested persons, there is one at whose house four terrorists had been killed on April 4, 2020,” the spokesperson said.

“The arrested members were mostly recruiting vulnerable school and college-going students as a few of them are students themselves. They were in close connection with the regular terrorists of Jaish outfit and had been under surveillance for quite some time,” it added.

The SIA said that the digital records seized are being sent to FSL for evidence analysis and the arrested persons would be presented before the NIA court in Srinagar seeking permission for custodial questioning.

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