Visakhapatnam espionage case: NIA suspects Pakistani operatives using Indian SIM for ‘honey-trapping’

A special court in Mumbai on Tuesday granted three-day transit remand of Shaikh till Friday to the NIA.

He will be produced before a court in Visakhapatnam on or before Friday, where the agency will seek his custody for further interrogation.

Shaikh has been booked under sections including the anti-terror law Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, Official Secrets Act and relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code related to criminal conspiracy and waging war.

Officials said that they were suspecting that Shaikh was involved in helping the Pakistani officers in activating SIM cards with Indian numbers by sharing the One Time Passwords (OTP) required to activate them.

The officials said that they were suspecting that the Indian numbers were then to be used for honey-trapping.

It is suspected that this was to be done on persons based in India and hence it was preferable to use Indian numbers for less suspicion.

This is the third arrest made by the National Investigation Agency in the case. The agency said that two phones were seized from Shaikh.

On Monday, it also conducted raids in Assam and claimed to have seized two more phones and “sensitive documents”.

Two others, Akash Solanki and Manmohan Surendra Panda, were arrested earlier this year.

The agency has so far filed a chargesheet in July and a supplementary chargesheet in November against the two arrested accused and two wanted Pakistani operatives.

The NIA chargesheet filed in Vishakapatnam this year had claimed that Solanki, a resident of Uttar Pradesh, who was working as an Electrical Artificer Radio Apprentice (EAC) at the Naval Dockyard,  “was passing on classified information relating to the Indian Navy Warships and submarines”.

The National Investigation Agency claimed in its supplementary chargesheet that Panda, a resident of Mumbai, was also sharing classified information related to the Navy to Pakistani operatives, both in return of monetary compensation, paid through crypto channels.

The probe was initially conducted by the counter intelligence cell of Andhra Pradesh before being transferred to the NIA.

The agency had said that wanted Pakistani national Meer Balaj Khan, along with Solanki, were part of an espionage module for procuring and leaking sensitive information pertaining to the Indian Navy to Pakistan based handlers.

Another wanted accused is one Alven, who the NIA says is a Pakistan based intelligence

operative.

In a statement, the NIA claimed that its probe is continuing to find information on the attempts made by foreign based elements to obtain sensitive and classified information relating to defence establishments across the country.