By Sanjay Sharma, IANS
Bhopal : A soldier in the Indian Army who allegedly helped a Pakistani national obtain vital information was arrested from Gwalior Monday, the police said.
The arrested soldier was identified as Neeraj Sharma, who had been posted at Sagar, also in Madhya Pradesh.
The Pakistani national Imran Qureshi, 34, who hails from Karachi, was arrested in state capital Bhopal Saturday along with two associates, Iqbal and Akhtar, who were nabbed from Sagar the same day. They were accused of sourcing vital information from the army.
A team of investigators has been sent to the eastern metropolis Kolkata to interrogate the Qureshi’s father-in-law, the police said. Sources said Qureshi’s father-in-law was also on the list of suspects.
“The Special Task Force and the local police have arrested Neeraj Sharma, a soldier of Naik rank, for his alleged involvement in anti-national activity. He had fled to Gwalior after the arrest of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) agent Qureshi in Bhopal and his two associates in Sagar last week,” police superintendent of Sagar Hari Singh Yadav told IANS over telephone Tuesday.
The police said Qureshi was in India for the last four years and lived at Kolkata, Mumbai and Lucknow. He allegedly sent information to Pakistan over telephone and e-mail. Officials said he was in Bhopal for the last three to four months and gathered information with help of Sharma.
Qureshi was recruited by ISI in 1995 and sent to Delhi in 2003, the police claimed. He subsequently went to Kolkata from where he went to Dhaka and got married.
Later he met Iqbal in Sagar, who helped him acquire a Permanent Account Number (PAN) card, a ration card and identification papers to procure a passport, according to the police. He was allegedly being financed from Dubai.
According to police officials, Qureshi stayed with his father-in-law Hamid Warsi after coming to India. The police will probe Warsi’s possible involvement in espionage. The investigators are also trying to retrieve call details of the cell phone used by Qureshi.