The National Intelligence Agency (NIA) arrested a web designer based in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar on suspicion of involvement with an international terrorist organisation on Friday.
The arrested web designer has been identified as Mohammad Zoaib Khan (40), a resident of Beribaug in the Harsul area. It is said that he had gathered some youth in the city and was in contact with ISIS handlers abroad.
Zoaib is a highly qualified engineer and worked as an engineer in an IT firm in Bengaluru. However, he came to the city during the Covid crisis and has been staying with his elderly parents for the past 2.5 years. He used to tell his parents that he had been assigned work-from-home tasks. He remained in his room all the time.
His father is a retired agriculture superintendent who worked in Jalna and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar districts. All the members of his family are qualified. One of his brothers works in Muscat and another in Libya. His brother-in-law is working in Dubai. He has two sons and a daughter, but his wife and children live separately.
On Friday, around 15 NIA officers armed with weapons conducted a raid on his house around 6am. Four of them, including a woman, entered his house. They seized his mobile phone and conducted an investigation for around 10 hours. They confiscated the phones of all the family members and inspected Zoaib’s room. Later, they took him to Mumbai. NIA had kept the entire raid confidential, and even the local police were not involved in it.
Zoaib had applied for a passport and was planning to go out of the country. However, his passport process was delayed as the local police had some queries in his verification. Hence, they had kept the process pending. He had been pursuing the local police for verification for the past few months, the sources said.
