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Maha ATS raids illegal phone exchange in Hyderabad
State intelligence has stepped up its surveillance following the arrest of two suspects from Hyderabad by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad last week for running illegal telephone exchange for allegedly aiding international espionage.
Hyderabad: State intelligence has stepped up its surveillance following the arrest of two suspects from Hyderabad by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad last week for running illegal telephone exchange for allegedly aiding international espionage.
Sources said the Military Intelligence in Jammu and Kashmir had alerted the Maharashtra ATS about Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls from Pakistan being routed to local numbers to facilitate communication.
Based on the information, Maharashtra ATS raided two locations – one in Hyderabad and the other in Latur of Maharashtra and picked up few person suspecting that sensitive information related to the Indian military could have been passed on to handlers in Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence.
Sources also said that the suspects from Hyderabad and Latur received large number of SIM cards from the handlers which were used to run the illegal telephone exchanges. During the raid in Hyderabad, ATS sleuths seized laptop, VoIP-GSM gateway sets, internet broadband modem and other incriminating material.
The illegal exchanges helped mask the calls and pass them off as local calls, keeping them off the intelligence agency radars.
This revelation prompted Telangana intelligence to look deep into such illegal exchanges that were unearthed in the recent past besides looking for more such exchanges that could still be running.
It may be recalled the city police have found four illegal telephone exchanges between February and March this year and arrested over a dozen accused. Though one of the illegal telephone exchanges was found receiving large number of calls from Pakistan, police did not take it seriously at that time considering them only as illegal money making centres.
However, the inputs from Military Intelligence prompted the Telangana police to go deep into the calls received by the illegal telephone exchanges unearthed in Hyderabad and its surroundings. Sources also said that the ISI pays hefty sum to the illegal telephone exchanges for two reasons – one to damage India’s economy and another to keep in touch with its agents across India bypassing the monitoring mechanism of the Indian intelligence agencies.
“We are verifying the calls handled by the illegal telephone exchanges unearthed in the recent past. We have also activated the informant network to find out whether anymore illegal exchanges are being run. It is important to go deep into such things keeping in view of the upcoming events such as Independence Day and Ganesh Chaturthi festival,” an intelligence official said.
