Nasheman News : Was a 45-year-old woman involved in the terror funding of a plot the NIA claims to have busted during multiple raids on Wednesday? In a shocker of sorts, the National Investigative Agency (NIA) has stumbled upon strong evidence implicating a mother-son duo from the state capital of being involved in a terror plot at the behest of the IS (Islamic State), an official said on Thursday.

The evidence was found during the raids by the NIA at several places, including Amroha and Lucknow on Wednesday.

The NIA probe has revealed as part of the new IS module “Harkat-ul-Harb-e-Islam”, a Muslim woman living near the City Station in Lucknow had sold her jewellery worth Rs 2.75 lakh to sponsor the terror plot in which her son was also involved. 

The woman, sources told IANS, was “very active on social media” and had come in link with the terror groups vide a social media network site.

With the money provided by the woman, the terror group purchased some weapons and explosives. Currently, the NIA is interrogating both mother and son about terror funding. 

The woman’s house at Nabiullah road was raided on Wednesday, leaving the neighbours in a state of shock as her activities never raised any suspicion. A laptop, two mobile phones have been recovered from their home.

The 45-year-old woman’s husband is a wholesale dealer in steel and aluminium utensils and her 18-year-old son studied from the Mazhar-ul-Islam madarsa. 

Officials told IANS the woman had sold her jewellery at Mam Mam jewellers at Akbari Gate and later allegedly funded the terror plot. 

All the angles are being probed by the NIA in an investigation that is being aided and assisted by the Anti-terror squad (ATS) of the Uttar Pradesh Police.

K A 22-year-old man took money from his neighbour’s father and later, hacked the son to death. The accused took the money pretending to be the son as he knew that his neighbour had never met his father. He later killed the real son out of fear.

A police officer mentioned that the accused knew that the teenager had never seen his father, who lived and worked in Kerala and was separated from his wife years ago. Police said that taking advantage of the situation, the accused collected the man’s phone number, spoke to him as his son and asked for monetary help.

“The father had sent money to Sheikh but when the man expressed his desire to pay a visit, the culprit killed Arshed out of fear,” said the officer. Arshed went missing on December 3 and his body was recovered from the fields, the officer added.

“Jamal Sheikh of Babuidanga village has been arrested on Monday for killing his neighbour Arshed Sheikh, 14,” a police officer of Purbasthali police station said.

The boy lived with his maternal grandparents.

Nasheman News : With the arrest of three persons including two school owners, the Delhi Police claimed to have busted a fake education board syndicate that cheated over 10,000 students in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and other states, an officer said on Wednesday.

Altaf Raja, 23, Manoj Kumar, 32, and Shambhu Nath Mishra, 46 — all residents of Uttar Pradesh’s Deoria and Balrampur districts — were arrested in separate raids between December 12 and 23.

“Police teams first arrested Altaf Raja while giving fake board certificate of higher secondary to a decoy customer in Vikas Puri of Delhi. Altaf Raja was granted 10-day police remand. Following his interrogation, Shamnbu Nath Mishra and Manoj Kumar, owners of two schools in Deoria, were arrested from their locations in Uttar Pradesh,” Additional Commissioner of Police Rajiv Ranjan told media.

“During investigation, we found that Altaf Raja and his accomplices were operating fake education board named ‘Board of Higher Secondary Education’ in Vikas Puri. They had cheated over 10,000 innocent students after convincing that their board is recognised and provides mark-sheets and certificates of 10th and 12th in only two to three months for Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000,” Ranjan said.

“The gang members collected the details of students on WhatsApp and received the amount in their bank accounts,” the officer said.

“A complaint in this regard was also received from the Directorate of Education of Delhi,” the officer said, adding that Altaf Raja was last year arrested by the Delhi Police for running another similar fake education board in east Delhi’s Geeta Colony.

After being later released on bail, Altaf again started a similar racket with his accomplices.

“The gang members, active in Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat and other states, were involved in circulating and distributing mark-sheets and certificates of their fake education board which has 23 websites,” he said.

“A large numbers of fake mark-sheets, certificates, provisional certificates and migration certificates, answer sheets, nominal rolls, question papers, record registers of students, and certificates of Class 10 and 12 were recovered from their possession,” he added.

The accused claimed that she was worried about the financial toll the child would have on her son, the father.

Days after a 29-day-old infant was found smothered to death in Bengaluru’s Viveknagar, Ashoknagar police arrested the baby’s grandmother on the grounds of murder. 53-year-old Vijayalakshmi was taken into custody by the police on Tuesday after she confessed to the crime.

On December 21, at around 5.30pm, Vijayalakshmi had strangled the child with her dupatta while the child’s mother, Stella, was tending to the baby’s twin in another room. She then covered the baby with her dupatta and placed it under the cot before going for her routine evening walk.

When Stella found her son missing, she informed her husband and Vijayalakshmi’s son, Karthik. The duo approached the Ashoknagar police to give a complaint. Police came and searched the home and found the child under the cot and rushed him to a nearby hospital where he was declared brought dead.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP Central) D Devaraja said that Vijayalakshmi had committed the crime because she felt that the child would be too much of a financial strain on her son. “My second grandson was born with health problems and was treated for 10 days after birth. The treatment continued even after we brought him home. On Thursday, my son and daughter-in-law decided to change their doctor as the baby showed no sign of improvement. He was treated for two days at a private nursing home in Fraser Town. I was worried he may not survive and it would burden my jobless son. So I decided to murder the child as my son would, anyway, be left with the other baby. I killed him when Stella was in the washroom,” Vijayalakshmi told the police.

However, there are also allegations that Vijayalakshmi was upset with her son’s decision to marry a woman of a different religion, which prompted her to commit the crime.

TNM

Nasheman News : The NIA on Wednesday carried out searches at 16 locations in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh in connection with a new Islamic State module ‘Harkat-ul-Harb-e-Islam’ and detained five persons, including one said to be the leader of the group, officials said.

The searches started at different location earlier and were still underway, a National Investigation Agency (NIA) official said.

In Uttar Pradesh, where it conducted joint searches with the states Anti-Terror Squad (ATS), five persons were detained in Amroha district.

The official said that one of the alleged module head Suhail was also detained from Amroha. 

Meanwhile, in east Delhi’s Jafarabad area the NIA carried out searches with the Delhi Police’s Special Cell. 

  Authorities have arrested a 29-year-old man suspected of spray-painting swastikas on US President Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, media reported.

Jose Ortega of Los Angeles was arrested on Sunday on suspicion of felony vandalism, said a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department.

The star is located on Hollywood Boulevard near Highland Avenue in Los Angeles, Xinhua news agency reported late on Tuesday.

A witness saw Ortega tag the star late Sunday afternoon and called the police, authorities said. He is being held in lieu of more than $20,000 bail, according to Los Angeles County jail records.

The graffiti had since been cleaned off from Trump’s star.

Nasheman News :  A statute of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was vandalized in the industrial city of Ludhiana in Punjab on Tuesday allegedly by Shiromani Akali Dal workers following which Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh ordered strict action by the district police against the perpetrators.

The statute was vandalized by Youth Akali Dal workers in Salem Tibri area of Ludhiana, around 120 km from here.

Accusing Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress of the killings of hundreds of Sikhs in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the Youth Akali Dal activists used spray paint to blacken the face of Rajiv Gandhi and painted his hands in red colour.

The activists then announced that they were doing this (vandalism) to show their anger against the role of Rajiv Gandhi, father of Congress president Rahul Gandhi, in the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in 1984 in the aftermath of the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two bodyguards.

Strongly condemning the vandalism, Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Tuesday asked SAD chief Sukhbir Singh Badal to stop indulging in petty politics.

Warning him that “such acts would backfire on his party in the coming Lok Sabha elections”, the Chief Minister asked Badal to immediately “apologize for the obnoxious act of his party workers”.

“Indulgence in such petty and condemnable actions will not absolve you or your family of the many sins of omission and commission against the Guru Granth Sahib and the Sikh community,” Amarinder said in a statement.

The Chief Minister directed the district police to immediately identify the culprits responsible for the violence and take strict action against them, as per law.

Lashing out at the Akalis, Amarinder said that “in their desperation to win public support, which the SAD had completely lost due to its criminal acts of commission and omission in the 10 years of SAD-BJP rule, the Badals and their supporters were stooping to abominable levels”.

“They are well aware of the fact that the Gandhis were never named or implicated in the 1984 riots, yet they continued to drag the family into the case to further their own political agenda,” said the Chief Minister.

Amarinder reiterated that only a few Congress, BJP and RSS workers were involved in the violence against the Sikh community in 1984 and the judiciary was proceeding to act against them.

“Sajjan Kumar had already been sentenced to life and others involved in the perpetration of the riots would also face legal action,” he added. “Had the Gandhis been involved in any way, they would have been named by at least some of the victims in the wake of the riots,” he observed, adding that while he had personally visited the refugee camps to meet the victims, Sukhbir had packed his bags and left for the United States and was totally unaware of the developments at that time.

“The Akali, in their frustration to seize political mileage, are taking law into their hands, which his government would not allow at any cost,” the Chief Minister warned, adding he would not let the state’s hard-earned peace be disturbed by anyone.

Punjab has a Congress government since March 2017, headed by Amarinder Singh.

Nasheman News :  A Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) worker H. Prakash was killed by four assailants due to alleged personal rivalry in Karnataka’s Maddur town in Mandya district, police said on Monday.

“Prakash, 50, was attacked by four men with a machete on Monday evening due to suspected personal rivalries. He succumbed to his injuries,” Maddur police station sub-inspector Kumara told IANS from Mandya district, about 100km southwest from here.

The JD-S worker was also a former Zilla Panchayat (ZP) member of the district, the police officer said.

A hunt was on to nab the accused, he added.

Chief Minister and JD-S leader H.D. Kumaraswamy expressed shock over the party activist’s death.

“Prakash was a loyal party worker. The district police have been directed to take steps to arrest the accused,” a statement from Kumaraswamy’s office said on Monday night.

Greater Bengaluru police have arrested a former policeman for allegedly sexually abusing his adopted daughter for at least three years. The accused, 63-year-old Kiran*, was arrested on December 18 and has been lodged in Parappana Agrahara central prison since then.

Police had arrested Kiran based on the 17-year-old survivor’s complaint, more than two years after she fled home. Unable to deal with the ordeal anymore, the survivor had left home and started living at a nearby bus stop. Locals who spotted the girl had called Child Line (1098).

A senior police official told media, that BOSCO (Bangalore Oniyavara Seva Coota), a non-profit that works on children’s issues, had rescued the girl. Later, she was staying in a children’s home run by another NGO in the city. It was during one of the counselling sessions that the survivor opened up about the sexual abuse she had experienced in the past.

“The sexual abuse happened during 2013-16. The girl was rescued by BOSCO first. We came to know about the incident when she reported it to the NGO. We immediately booked the accused, he is currently in judicial custody,” the officer said.

A case has been filed under sections 376 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code and Sections 6 and 10 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

Kiran, who had retired as a sub-inspector from Bengaluru police, was working with a commercial gold loan company as a law advisor. According to the police, Kiran and his wife had adopted the girl after their biological daughter died a few years ago.

Preliminary investigation has found that Kiran’s wife did not help the survivor nor report her husband’s deeds to the police when she came to know about it. Kiran had allegedly been sexually abusing the survivor since the time she turned 13 and threatened to throw her out if she spoke up about it. Police claim that Kiran confessed that he would send his wife and other members of the household to the temple and assault the survivor.

Karnataka had the highest registered cases of crimes against children among the southern states for 2016 and 2017. According to data compiled by the Karnataka police, a total of 1,778 cases of POCSO were registered this year till November, with 167 cases of POCSO registered in November alone.

TNM

Nasheman News : The police on Friday busted a fake call centre in Sector 63 of Noida and arrested 126 persons for making fake calls posing as Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents and extorting money from persons based in the US, an official said.

The police also seized 312 computers and as many headphones, apart from various computer accessories, Noida Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Ajay Pal said, adding that Rs 80 lakh in cash was also recovered during the raid.

The raid was conducted by Special Operations Group (SOG) personnel and the Cyber Cell of the Noida police, he added. 

This call centre had been operating for many months was recently put on surveillance.

A case has been registered in Phase III Police Station under various sections of the Indian penal Code (IPC) and the IT Act. 

The official said that the American nationals used to transfer money through Google Play cards.

The arrested call centre employees include Manish Balbani, Sunil Sharma, Mayur Vania, and Pradeep Rathore. All the accused have been sent to judicial custody.