Al-Qaeda planning terror attacks in Bengal, IB report says.

New Delhi, 13/11: An Intelligence Bureau(IB) report dated November 5, 2020, has revealed that Pakistan based terrorist organization Al-Qaeda is planning a massive terrorist attack in West Bengal. They are recruiting local youth and making them go through radicalization. The attack will be mostly done by sleeper cells and with the help of their foreign handlers, there were attempts to radicalize the local youth. Sources have said that the recruiting is being done through online sources and these facts came out after an Al-Qaeda module was being questioned by the National Intelligence Agency(NIA).

The sources from NIA revealed that Al-Qaeda is targetting several top-level political leaders in its plan. The terrorist group is reported to have opened up new recruitment centres in Peshawar and Karachi from where Bengal youths were being radicalized and recruited. NIA has arrested 11 terror operatives in connection to this radicalization drive.

Recently, NIA arrested a person who was a part of various social media groups being operated by handlers from Pakistan belonging to the outlawed terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, recruiting and radicalising Indian youth to conduct terror acts in India, sources stated. A resident of the northern part of Karnataka, Sayyad M. Idris, 28 was arrested on Tuesday, a spokesperson for NIA said. The case came out of an FIR registered in West Bengal on March 18, 2020, pertained to Pakistani handlers of Lashkar-e-Taiba, using various social media platforms like Facebook to recruit and radicalize the youth vulnerable enough to be brain-washed and gas-lighted in order to conduct various terror acts across the Indian subcontinent, designated as sleeper cells, and carrying out their ideology, as a source from NIA stated.