Youth gets invites on WhatsApp to join LeT

Lucknow: A group on WhatsApp called “Join the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba” has sent the UP police into a tizzy. Manoj Gupta, 20, received a link on Sunday to join the WhatsApp group. The link did not open. He immediately lodged a complaint with the Hazratganj police about the message. The matter was handed over to the Anti-Terror Squad later in the night. “Gupta told us that he had received another message offering membership to another group called MIM, but its full name has not yet been ascertained. However, we have traced the person who posted the message, it is a 15 year old boy form Bhilwara in Rajasthan. The boy had received the message from another school boy and he simply forwarded it. Our team is in touch with Rajasthan police and we are trying to track the source of the link”, said IG ATS Aseem Arun.

The school boy , a student of class 9, is being interrogated by the Rajasthan police since he is also the admin of the group from which the message was forwarded.

The official said that the ATS team was probing the matter to find out whether this was an attempt to radicalize innocent teenagers.

It is noteworthy that on February 5, the ATS had arrested one Sheikh Ali Akbar from Lucknow who confessed that he had been radicalized after joining various groups on the social media.
 
Akbar said that he was a member of nine such groups with names like ‘Hizbul Hamari Shaan’, ‘Hizub Media’ and ‘Kashmir ki Azaadi’. Akbar had joined these groups in November last year and was already involved in arranging firearms for the terror operatives.

Abhay Misra, nodal officer of the cyber cell of UP police said that the boy had deleted the group when the police reached to him but the data was now being recovered by experts. Other members of the group are also being identified and interrogated.