A view of National Investigation Agency (NIA), in New Delhi.
| Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
The National Investigation Agency has zeroed in on several front organisations and student wings that were purportedly tasked by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) with identifying suitable persons to work as underground cadre for the banned outfit, wage a war against the government, and carry out violent terrorist acts.
On Friday, on a tip-off that the CPI (Maoist) was attempting to revive its presence in the ‘Northern Regional Bureau’ (NRB) area, the agency raided nine locations across Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh allegedly linked to various accused and suspects in a case registered in 2023.
“These included four locations in Punjab, two each in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, and one in Delhi. All these States, along with Himachal Pradesh, constitute the NRB, which the terrorist organisation is aggressively targeting in a bid to revive itself,” said the NIA.
Several laptop, mobile phones, pen drives, compact discs, hard drive, memory cards, SIM cards, and pocket diaries were seized during the searches., the NIA said.
According to the agency, the suspects were receiving funds for the propagation of CPI (Maoist) ideology from the erstwhile Eastern Regional Bureau (ERB) head Prashant Bose, who along with his wife was arrested by the Jharkhand police in November 2021. He carried a reward of ₹1 crore on his head. He was allegedly a member of the outfit’s central committee and polit bureau.
The ERB unit, particularly from Jharkhand, had been funding the suspects, believed to be long-time associates and over-ground workers of the accused persons in the case. They had been roped in to expand and strengthen the outfit’s base in northern States through recruitment, it is alleged.