The Gujarat police’s Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) on Friday arrested a man, a native of Pakistan who was granted Indian citizenship in 2005, for allegedly helping Pakistani authorities spy on Indian defence personnel by sending them tracking malware through WhatsApp, an official said.
Based on the inputs shared by the Military Intelligence about an Indian WhatsApp number being operated from Pakistan to spy on defence personnel, the ATS nabbed one Labhshankar Maheshwari, 53, from Tarapur town in Anand district and brought him here, the official said. The accused has been booked under Indian Penal Code (IPC) section 123 (concealing with intent to facilitate a design to wage war against the government) and 121-A (conspiracy to wage war against the government) and under relevant sections of the Information Technology Act, he said.
The investigation has revealed that Maheshwari, a native of Pakistan who was granted Indian citizenship in 2005, had agreed to be part of the conspiracy to expedite the visa process for him, his wife and two other family members wanting to visit the neighbouring country to meet relatives, ATS Superintendent of Police Om Prakash Jat said. "The Indian Military Intelligence recently learnt that either the Pakistan Army or Pakistan’s intelligence agency had somehow acquired an Indian SIM card, which was being used for spying on Indian defence personnel by sending them malware through WhatsApp. Based on the information, we apprehended Maheshwari from Tarapur in Anand, where he runs a grocery shop," he told reporters.
Last year, when Maheshwari and his wife had applied for visitor visas for Pakistan, his relative Kishor Ramwani, who is based in the neighbouring country, had asked him to contact a person with links to the Pakistan embassy, the official said. After the unidentified person’s intervention, Maheshwari and his wife received the visa. After returning to India, he again contacted the person to expedite the visa process for his sister and niece, he said. "In return, the person with contacts in the Pakistan embassy (high commission) asked Maheshwari to start WhatsApp on his mobile phone using a SIM card, which he received from one Saqlain Thaim, a resident of Jamnagar. Maheshwari then shared the OTP to activate WhatsApp with that man," Jat said.
As instructed, Maheshwari, posing as an employee of an Army school, started sending messages to defence personnel and urged them to download an 'apk' file to upload information about their children on the official website of the school, he said. In some instances, the accused had lured Army personnel to install the application, claiming it was part of the government’s 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign. "In reality, that 'apk' file was a Remote Access Trojan, a type of malware that extracts all the information from a mobile phone, such as contacts, location and videos, and sends the data to a command and control centre outside India. As of now, we found that the mobile phone of a soldier stationed at Kargil was compromised with that malware. We are yet to ascertain how many more persons were targeted,” Jat said.
The preliminary probe has revealed that when Maheshwari’s sister visited Pakistan this year, she took that SIM card with her and handed it over to a relative, who then gave it to an official there, he said. The SIM card was purchased by Thaim at the direction of a Pakistani operative and activated by another Jamnagar resident Asgar Modi, the official said, adding that both are now on the run and believed to have left the country.
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