Sunday, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) went to 14 places in five states as part of its ongoing investigation into the actions of the banned group Popular Front of India (PFI).
Raids were done in Kannur and Malappuram, both in Kerala; Dakshin Kannada, also in Kerala; Nashik and Kolhapur, both in Maharashtra; Murshidabad, in West Bengal; and Katihar, in Bihar.
“Several incriminating digital devices and documents were seized during the raids,” the NIA said. The raids were meant to find out how the banned group was planning to upset India’s peace and communal harmony.
The NIA has been trying to “unravel and stop the attempts by the PFI and its top leadership to create an armed cadre and raise a PFI army in order to set up an Islamic Caliphate in India by 2047 through acts of terror, violence, and sabotage.”
Weapons training
The agency says that the PFI has been planning to radicalize naive young people and teach them how to use weapons to further its violent anti-Indian goal. It thinks that several middle-level PFI agents are acting as master trainers and running arms training camps for its highly radicalized members in different states.
Based on information it has received and what it has found, the agency has been raiding multiple sites in different states for several months to find and arrest PFI operatives.
In April 2022, the NIA made a record of this case. “The agency gathered evidence that led to the arrest of several top PFI leaders, including more than a dozen National Executive Council members, after countrywide operations in September 2022,” the agency said.
In March 2023, the NIA filed a charge sheet against 19 people in the same case. The PFI as a group was also called out. The PFI national supervisor of weapons training was then charged with more crimes in April of this year.
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