How Islamic State operatives in Hyderabad covered their tracks

The NIA had recently charge-sheeted eight persons in connection with the Hyderabad IS module case.

The National Investigation Agency which recently bust a module of the Islamic State in Hyderabad has learnt that applications such as Orbot and Orfox were used. These applications are used to hide a user's internet usage. This technology helped the operatives hide their tracks for a long time until the Intelligence Bureau got the better of them.

The NIA had recently charge-sheeted eight persons in connection with the Hyderabad IS module case. The operatives are believed to have been advised by their handler Shafi Ramar to use such technology to avoid detection. The NIA says that this module was planning a series of attacks on police stations.

Further, the NIA also found that the operatives had used a map application called OsmAnd+. They went about their operation by using highly encrypted applications to hide their tracks the NIA also says.

Apart from this the NIA also found that the operatives had digital documents containing three GPS co-ordinates saved in it, The police stations under their radar were at Kamathipura, Afzalganj and Bahadurpura in Hyderabad.

After gathering information the operatives sent the coordinates to Armar in Syria using an application known as Pidgin. This application, the NIA says, allows users to log into multiple chat accounts at the same time. It was also found that the operatives stayed in touch using the Nymgo application. The chat applications frequently used by them were Trillian and Chatsecure. The emails were sent out through an Tutanota.