Over ₹1.5 crore transactions via PFI members’ bank accounts: UP STF

LUCKNOW : Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (UP STF) officials on Wednesday claimed transactions of over ₹1.5 crore were made via different bank accounts of Popular Front of India (PFI) members between 2018 and 2020.

Based on the documents seized from different locations, the STF officials, privy to an ongoing investigation, said that the money was being used to fund illegal activities and instigate violence in Uttar Pradesh.

The STF had carried out searches on February 21 at three locations in Delhi related to PFI and its students’ wing Campus

Front of India (CFI) as part of an investigation in a case of alleged funding to incite caste violence in the backdrop of the gang rape and murder of a 19-year-old woman in Hathras in September 2020, police officials had said.

The state police agency seized allegedly incriminating documents, including details of different bank accounts of PFI members, during the searches. The STF team conducted searches on the basis of information extracted from the CFI’s general secretary Rauf Shareef, who was arrested at Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram) airport in Kerala on December 12, 2020 on a look-out notice by UP Police.

A senior STF official said Shareef

had received huge amounts of money in his bank accounts through suspicious transactions, which were also detected in a probe by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) earlier in the matter.

“The (STF) probe hints about the transaction of ₹1.5 crore, including amounts transferred to the PFI members accounts from abroad,” he added.

Another police official said the ED had earlier traced a foreign remittance of around ₹ 35 lakh from different bank accounts to the bank accounts of Shareef in 2020. He said the probe also revealed that there were major expenses shown for the purpose of land and vehicle purchases.