Charge sheet against IS suspect

Wife says he was only researching about IS, Rajasthan ATS asked him to stop doing namaaz "in a bid to deradicalise him"

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Saturday filed a charge sheet against a marketing manager of the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) for his alleged links to the militant outfit the Islamic State (IS). The accused, Mohammad Sirajuddin (33), was arrested from Jaipur in December last year by the Rajasthan Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) and the case was later transferred to the NIA in February this year. However, Sirajuddin’s wife Yasmeen Tarannum told The Hindu that her husband was only “researching” the terror outfit on the Internet and he had been falsely accused by the ATS for terror links. Tarannum also refuted the NIA’s allegation that Sirajuddin wanted to travel to Syria along with his newborn son to make him a mujaheed, as reported earlier by The Hindu. “Whenever a subject interested him, he went deeper into it. So was the case with the IS. He was only trying to research about it on the Internet. He had no intention to harm anybody or fight for them. He was only curious to find about the enigma around the IS. He was arrested because he searched for the IS on the web,” said Tarannum, a computer application scientist. She also said when the Rajasthan ATS could not obtain any evidence against Sirajuddin, they asked him to confess that he had been “radicalised.” “Rajasthan ATS had no evidence against him. They did not know what to book my husband for. In the name of counselling, they called some man who asked my husband to give up his religion and stop reading namaaz. They even asked him to not believe in Koran and not to drink alcohol. In the name of modernisation, they asked him to visit brothels and watch pornography. This is appalling,” she said. The Rajasthan ATS had Sirajuddin on charges of promoting the ideology of the IS, inciting others to become its follower and indulging in terrorist and anti-national activities through various social media platforms and web-based application services like Facebook, Whatsapp and Telegram.