Three men from Hyderabad on their way to join Islamic State in Afghanistan have been taken into custody by the police in Nagpur.
Abdul Wasim, Umar Hasan Farooqui and Majh Hasan Farooque, all in their twenties, had been registered as missing on Thursday by their families in Hyderabad. They were nabbed at the Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar international airport in Nagpur by Telangana police and Maharashtra Anti-terrorist squad (ATS) while on their way to Srinagar.
Two of the three had been picked up by the police in Kolkata in September 2014 for attempting to join Isis in Iraq. They were let off after questioning as they had not committed a crime in India. Both of them had been under surveillance by the police ever since.
The three will be brought back to Hyderabad by the Telangana Police.
They had gone to Nalagonda, Telengana on Friday to visit a deceased Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) activist's home from where they travelled to Nagpur by road, and were supposed to take a Srinagar-bound flight.
The operation, which was executed in the early hours Saturday, comes in the wake of Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar's statement, in Jammu and Kashmir, on 24 December when he said that India has been successful in reducing the influence of Isis on the youth.
"We are trying to reduce the numbers (of youths getting attracted towards the ideology of the ISIS) and we have achieved success in it," PTI quoted Parrikar as saying.
