NIA arrested people as they were planning some terror attack. The nine men held from Kerala’s Ernakulam and West Bengal on Saturday by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), alleged to be part of an inter-state terror module of Al Qaeda and had plans to travel to Jammu and Kashmir to deliver weapons, the agency has stated. The weapons and home-made explosives were to be delivered for their associates, as they continued to take orders from their Pakistan-based handlers, NIA officials said. 

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The announcements came as the NIA smashed the inter-state terror module after it carried out searches at multiple locations in Murshidabad in West Bengal and Ernakulam in Kerala. The NIA arrested nine Al Qaeda terrorists, three from Kerala and six from West Bengal. An NIA official related to the inquiry told a leading daily, "These terrorists were planning to go to Kashmir for weapons delivery to their handlers." They had amassed potassium nitrate from firecrackers bought in large amounts. Reportedly, while NIA has not grabbed weapons from men arrested from Ernakulam, it has seized explosives from those arrested from West Bengal.

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"During the raids, the agency got a huge cache of firecrackers. They bought the firecrackers to hide procurement of huge amounts of potassium required to make the IEDs," a senior NIA official related to the inquiry told the leading daily. The official asserted that the arrested were in touch with their Pakistan-based handler Hamza. They planned attacks on several vital installations in Delhi-NCR and other parts of the country with an aim to kill innocent people and strike terror in their minds.

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