Two Jordanians and a Palestinian national were arrested by the Special Task Force (STF) and Intelligence Bureau (IB) on Saturday after they were found in possession of fake passports and other documents. The three were residing at a rented house in Indiranagar locality and are said to have links with the intelligence agency Hamas.
Sources said that one of the arrested was in constant touch with a few embassies in New Delhi and their personal diaries and communiques have details of Hamas in them. A bulk of the documents seized during the raid had been handed over to RAW and IB for further investigations, STF sources said.
Director-general of police (DGP) R.K. Pandit said that the arrested were identified as Shameer and Adnan of Jordan and Basheel of Palestine. Basheel was based in Delhi and had come to visit the other two in the state capital. He said that two of them were holed up in India for quite sometime now and the recovery of forged passports, marksheets and degrees of colleges in Lucknow and Delhi suggest that their purpose of stay was highly suspicious.
STF official Rajiv Sabarwal said that Basheel had been deported to Jordan twice in 1999 and 2000 from Delhi. This time he sneaked into India through Nepal and landed in Uttar Pradesh from Sunauli border. He said the startling aspect of the documents recovered from their possession was that not a single page of their passports was left untampered. “Either the visa pages are missing or have been tampered in one way or the other,” Mr Sabarwal said.
“One of the accused, Adnan, is a
computer wizard and was on the internet when we raided the house,” said
superintendent of police, STF, Anant Deo. He said he managed to delete
some files from his PC before he could be overpowered by the sleuths. “We
have reasons to believe that he managed to launder some information which
could have proved useful to us in terms of investigations,” he said. Adnan
was also simultaneously chatting to someone on the net when he was picked
up.