In a major success, ten overground workers (OGWs) of the banned Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) terror group were on Wednesday arrested by the State Investigation Agency (SIA).
SIA officials conducted raids overnight at various locations in the South and Central district of Kashmir, during which the arrests were made, police said.
Police said the 10 people, who were working independently or as ‘sleeper cells’ of JeM, were identified during a probe carried out by the SIA. Neither of them was aware of each other’s activities and were taking instructions from JeM terrorist commanders directly.
The module, whose members were organised into sub-modules in the form of verticals so that in the event of detection of one member, the bigger network does not get compromised, had been painstakingly discovered through discreet surveillance, in which corroborative intelligence capable of being converted into admissible evidence in court was used to ascertain and confirm the JeM membership of these individuals.
Those arrested were active in recruiting young people, arranging finances, and transporting weapons in the south and central Kashmir, besides providing other logistic support.
During raids, cell phones, SIM cards, records to show the use of banking channels, and a dummy pistol were seized.
Among those arrested is a person at whose house four terrorists were killed on 4 April 2020, police said.
The aim of these OGWs was to work towards furthering terror activities in the south and central Kashmir and were mostly recruiting vulnerable school and college-going students as a few of them are students themselves.
Digital records seized from them are being sent to a forensic laboratory for evidence analysis.