15 ISIS terrorists sentenced in one of a kind Delhi conspiracy case

New Delhi, Oct 17: A special court of the National Investigation Agency has sentenced 15 accused in connection with the Islamic State Delhi conspiracy case.

The NIA said that the ISIS was trying to establish its base in India by recruiting Muslim youth into the ISIS. During investigation, searches were conducted in various cities across the country and 19 accused were arrested. It was revealed that the accused persons had formed an organisation by the name Junood-ul-Khilafa-Fil-Hind (a group seeking to establish Caliphate in India and pledging allegiance to ISIS/ISIL) to recruit Muslim youth to work for ISIS and commit acts of terrorism in India at the behest of one Yusuf-Al-Hindi who was based in Syria.

This case had a huge impact on the like-minded people who were likely to join ISIS . After the arrest of the SIS terrorists, their activities were minimised and their other associates were identified and questioned to unravel their further plans. Several ISIS sympathisers, who had gone to join ISIS, were intercepted at various locations in the Middle East and were deported back to India. The investigation conducted by the agency stopped the facilitation of the ISIS members in India as well as abroad.

Those convicted are Nafees Khan, Mudabbir Mushtaq Sheikh, Abu Anas, Mufti Abdus Sami, Amzad Khan, Mohd. Shariff Moinudeen, Asif Ali, Mohd. Hussain, Syed Mujahid, Najmul Huda, Mohd. Obedullah, Md. Aleem, Md. Afzal and Sohail Ahmad.

This case was first of its kind in which an extensive terrorist conspiracy involving online radicalisation was hatched on cyber space in the aftermath of declaration of Islamic Caliphate by Abu-Baqar-Al-Bagdadi in 2014 and Yusuf Al Hindi alias Shafi Armar, based in Syria had slowly radicalised a number of accused and eventually motivated them towards violent jihad as propagated by ISIS.

This case was first of its kind in which these ISIS terrorist had conspired to carryout terrorist acts in various parts of the country as is evident from the evidence on record with regard to their conspiracy meetings in Hyderabad (Telangana), Bangalore (Karnataka), Pune (Maharashtra) and Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh).