NIA arrests Imam in Bengal's East Burdwan for suspected terror links

Kolkata: The National Investigation Agency (NIA), on Tuesday, arrested an Imam of a mosque at Palishgram village under Mangalkot Police Station in East Burdwan district of West Bengal on suspicion of having links with terror networks.

The arrested individual has been identified as Piar Mohammad Sheikh, who was serving as the Imam of a mosque in Palishgram village under the Mangalkot Police Station limits. He is originally a resident of Kulut village in the Monteswar area of the same district.

According to sources, an NIA team, assisted by local police personnel, conducted an operation at the Palishgram Purbapara mosque on Tuesday morning and detained Sheikh from the premises. Investigators subsequently searched the room where he had been staying and seized a diary and a mobile phone.

Sources aware of the development said that investigators found the numbers of several Bangladeshis in the diary. He was taken from the mosque to Mangalkot Police Station for interrogation. NIA sleuths are trying to extract as much information from him as possible.

Local residents told media persons that Sheikh had been associated with the mosque for the last three years. His arrest took the villagers by surprise. They said they could not even think of his links with terrorist forces based out of Bangladesh.

However, the mosque committee member Golam Mustafa and some villagers said that the arrested Imam used to go to Bangladesh frequently. “Recently, too, he went to Bangladesh and spent almost six months there. He returned to Palishgram again a few months back,” a local villager said.

NIA officials are, however, tight-lipped over whether the arrest of the Imam is connected with the parallel raids and search operations conducted by separate teams of the central agency in five locations in different districts of West Bengal since Tuesday morning.

NIA is probing alleged sleeper cells of the Bangladesh-based militant outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

Tuesday’s raid and search operations were in relation to a case registered in neighbouring Assam, and the NIA’s actions in West Bengal were based on specific information secured by the central agency in the matter.

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