Diplomat met ‘spies’ every month for tasks

NEW DELHI: The arrest of two alleged spies in the espionage racket has opened a can of worms with 13 Border Security Force (BSF) officers now under the scanner for leaking secret information to the two men.

According to sources, the racket was on for the past 18 months.

Diplomat Mehmood Akhtar used to give a specific task to the two alleged spies - Maulana Ramzan Khan (50) and Subhash Jangir (37) - who would then contact personnel from the paramilitary and army to take out the required information. Their area of operation was in the border areas of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

“Akhtar sitting in the Pakistan high commission in Delhi used to call a meeting and direct the men to get specific documents that included maps of the army’s secret deployment, codes exchanged between army bases, inputs received from across the border and even strategies charted out on maps in a code language,” a police source said.

Akhtar paid the two men between ₹30,000 and ₹50,000 per document. At times, they were asked to get information verbally for which they were paid between ₹15,000 and ₹20,000.

According to police, Maulana Ramzan Khan had a good network among personnel.

“We had been tracking Maulana’s movement for the past one month and found that he had a good network in the army and paramilitary. He was also in touch with former BSF personnel, one of them being his distant relative. He would visit the base as a maulana and befriend people. It is still unclear if he paid money to the personnel in exchange of information,” a police source said.

Sources also said the men never exchanged information or documents via email or Whatsapp.

“They used to meet once in a month at either Jama Masjid or Purana Qila, where the spies used to hand over the information to the diplomat. It is during these meetings that the diplomat assigned them the next task. They were not in touch through emails and made sure they met physically,” a police source said.

Recently, Akhtar had asked them to arrange a list of BSF officers deployed in the region along with their home addresses and contact details.