New Delhi: Indians based out of Syria have formed a module of the deadly terror group Islamic State (IS) to carry out attacks back home, sources in intelligence agencies have said.
Sources told CNN-IBN that these terrorists have been recruiting in India since 2004 and that at least 60 could be active in the country now. This is a big jump from a previous estimate of 23 active IS local operatives.
The recruiters in Syria are allegedly terrorists who belonged to the homegrown Indian Mujahideen who fled the country because of the crackdown by security agencies after the 2008 Mumbai attack.
These recruiters were found to be targeting Muslim youth in the southern states and Uttar Pradesh and were trying to radicalise them through cyber propaganda, sources said.
The recruitments were mostly being carried out in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.
Intelligence agencies suspect they were being trained to make terror strikes in religious centres like Haridwar or tourist hotspots like Goa which has the maximum concentration of foreign visitors.
The plan could be to carry out high-visibility coordinated terror attacks like the recent ones in Paris and Jakarta, sources said.
The information suggests that the Centre is publicly downplaying the threat to the country from the IS. Sources in the government said they were "carefully evaluating" the threat perception from the terror group.
It comes on a day the National Investigation Agency arrested or detained 14 young men, some of them software engineers, for possible links to the IS. They were suspected of plotting coordinated terror strikes in different cities.
The arrests were made from different parts of the country by NIA along with state police forces and central security agencies. Family members of some of the arrested people claimed they have nothing to do with any terror plot and that they were innocent.
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