New Delhi: Espionage ring accused Shoaib was arrested on Friday after he was brought to New Delhi from Jodhpur, with the police claiming he was in touch with expelled Pakistan high commission staffer Mehmood Akhtar for three to four years and had visited Pakistan six times.
Sources said the module that Akhtar ran was planning to carry out a strike similar to the 2008 Mumbai attack somewhere on India’s west coast.
“There have been intelligence inputs that Pakistan’s ISI was planning to send terrorists through the sea route to carry out a Mumbai-type terror attack in India. Akhtar’s activities and his interest in gathering information about the west coast buttress the intelligence inputs,” an official said.
Akhtar was trying to get information on security forces along the west coast, Sir Creek and Kutch, and military installations in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa, a home ministry official said.
Investigators said they would try to recover data from a phablet which Shoaib had tried to damage when he was detained in Jodhpur on Thursday.
