The National Investigating Agency (NIA) on Tuesday said that their investigations had not indicated any direct link between alleged Islamic State (IS) recruit Areeb Majeed and Mehdi Biswas, recently arrested by the Bengaluru police for allegedly operating a Twitter account in favour of the IS. Biswas was arrested on December 13 after he was found to be operating a pro-IS account, with the handle @ShamiWitness, on Twitter. The NIA subsequently sent a team to Bengaluru to probe for any connection between Areeb and Biswas. “Areeb has said in his interrogation that he followed several accounts on Twitter as well as on Facebook. We initially suspected that Areeb might have been following Biswas’s account. However, we have not found anything to confirm a connection between the two,” said an NIA officer. The officer added that they have already contacted service providers in India as well as abroad and sought details of all the online forums that Areeb actively participated in. Areeb, along with his friends Fahad Sheikh, Saheem Tanki and Amaan Tandel, left from Kalyan in May this year and allegedly joined the IS in Iraq. He was brought back to India in November this year and arrested by the NIA under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act as well as the Indian Penal Code. mumbai.newsline@expressindia.com
