17 years after getting Indian citizenship, Pak-origin man arrested in Gujarat for ‘spying’

His arrest came on the back of specific intelligence from the Military Intelligence (MI) that Pakistani operatives were using an Indian SIM card to target Indian defence personnel.

After coming to Tarapur with his wife in 1999 for “fertility treatment”, Maheshwari (53) lived with his in-laws, who had migrated from Pakistan earlier. “He applied for a long-term visa, and with the support of his in-laws, he established himself as a successful businessman, running a grocery store and renting out multiple stores and a house in Tarapur,” defence sources said. Maheshwari and his wife did not, however, have any children.

In early 2006, he got Indian citizenship. In 2022, he visited his parents in Pakistan and is believed to have been “cultivated” by Pakistani agents during the processing of his Pakistani visa. During his six-week stay with his parents, he is believed to have been in touch with a Pakistani intelligence agency, sources said.

After his return to India, the ATS said, he facilitated the delivery of a SIM card registered in the name of a Jamnagar resident, Mohammad Saqlain Umar Tahim, to a Pakistan embassy contact.

Maheshwari was connected with this embassy contact through his Pakistan-based cousin, Kishorebhai alias Savai Jagdishkumar Ramwani, the ATS said. Maheshwari had contacted this cousin for help with visas to Pakistan in 2022, years after he had obtained Indian citizenship.

After Maheshwari travelled to Pakistan with his wife, he got visas for his sister and his niece through the same contact. He then sent the SIM card through his sister to the cousin, who in turn, got it delivered to Pakistani agents, authorities said.

Om Prakash Jat, Superintendent of Police, ATS, told The Indian Express: “An unknown man connected with Ramwani (Maheshwari’s cousin) told Maheshwari that his sister would get her visa, but she would also receive a SIM card in which she needs to activate her WhatsApp and send the OTP (one-time password) to him. The man also told Maheshwari that after the visa process is done, and his sister goes to Pakistan, she needs to bring the SIM card with her.”

Maheshwari has been booked for espionage, and under sections of the Information Technology Act. He was remanded to seven-day custody, the ATS said.

Defence sources told The Indian Express that at around the third week of July, MI officials detected “a nefarious campaign by a Pakistani Intelligence Operative, using a WhatsApp number to compromise Android mobile handsets of serving defence forces personnel, mostly having wards studying in different Army Public Schools across the country, by luring them to install certain malicious Android applications (.apk files), mostly under the garb of the ‘Har Ghar Tiranga’ campaign just before Independence Day”.

“A WhatsApp user, posing as an Army school official, sent the malicious application to such targets with a text message encouraging them to install the application and upload their ward’s photo with the national flag on the application to participate in a competition,” sources said.

“It is suspected that Pakistani agencies managed to acquire a significant amount of information pertaining to students (and their guardians) of Army schools through old or existing vulnerabilities in the latter’s website or Android application, ‘DigiCamps’, which is used for paying fees. These are schools that come under Army Welfare Education Society, a private body supported by the Indian Army,” defence sources said.

By sending ‘.apk’ files via WhatsApp, Pakistani operatives infected phones with the Remote Access Trojan malware, sources said.

(With inputs from Aditi Raja in Vadodara)