3 Hyderabad men held at Nagpur ‘on the way to join IS’

NAGPUR: Three Hyderabad-based cousins were arrested at the Nagpur airport on Saturday following an alert that they were trying to leave the country to join the Islamic State (IS) terrorist outfit.

The Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad (ATS) and Telangana police jointly arrested the trio, aged between 20 and 25 years, months after they were put under watch for being influenced by online IS propaganda.

Officials said the three youth — Umar Hassan Farooqui, Abdul Wasim and Zamir Farooqui — travelled to Nagpur on a staterun bus on Friday and went to the airport the following morning to board an Indigo flight to Srinagar from where they had planned to go to Afghanistan. “We got information that the youth would be boarding the early morning flight,” an official said.

“The youth were handed over to the Telangana counter-intelligence cell.”

Among the three, two were earlier held in Kolkata in September 2014 where they allegedly planned to cross over to Bangladesh and travel to Iraq. The duo, reportedly engineering college dropouts, told investigators that they were lured by IS propaganda on social media.

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