Who is the fake spy Arun Selvaranjan?

The class 10 dropout was arrested here Wednesday after being watched for over a month by the NIA sleuths helped by the Intelligence Bureau. He has been remanded to judicial custody but NIA will soon seek his custody to squeeze out more details of the ISI network in the region.

“When we grabbed him, he was very concerned about an event he was organising at MRC Nagar on Friday and about proposing to his girlfriend. His arrest is a major breakthrough in the investigation of ISI espionage network in this part of India”, the NIA officer said requesting anonymity.

He said since his Moradabad bank account inflows were huge and so were the withdrawals, NIA was probing if he was the conduit for funding the other ISI agents in the region.

Arun is the third major catch from the ISI basket for the NIA after Thameem Ansari (September, 2013, at Trichy) and Zakir Hussain (April 29, 2014, at Chennai). The three were part of a network being developed in South India by the ISI handler Amir Zubair Siddique masquerading as a diplomat at the Pakistani high commission in Colombo with the blessings of the Island Government, sources said.

Much like the other two, Arun was busy collecting documents and photographs of important defence and other sensitive places and supplying them over e-mail by sharing the same mail ID with his ISI handler and leaving the material in the ‘draft’ box for easy access. He also used Skype and Viber to communicate with the handlers. “Arun could be collecting digital and visual guides of Tamil Nadu coast for possible use for a 26/11 type attack on the state (from the sea). We got him before he could do any damage”, another official involved in the probe said.

Preliminary probe revealed that Arun had collected information and photos of TN police headquarters and the Coast Guard near the Marina, Kalpakkam atomic energy installation, Officers’ Training Academy at St Thomas Mount, NSG hub near Vandalur and the submarine facility of the Indian Navy at Vizag, besides some other government facilities, for supplying to his ISI bosses.

Arun was born in Colombo and did his initial schooling there before the family moved to Chennai, where the boy studied up to class ten. The family went back to Colombo but Arun opted out of school. He attended a crash course in aviation hospitality and started an event management company in Colombo before shifting to Chennai. His parents continue to live in Colombo.