Every day, Pakistan uses different strategies to obtain intelligence from India. A 36-year-old man named Bhaktabanshi Jha from Bihar has turned out to be the recent victim of our hostile neighbour’s trickery. He was honey-trapped and transferred critical information to Pakistan following which he was arrested, according to the inputs shared by military intelligence on 25 August.
The accused provided the Pakistani intelligence agency with sensitive military secrets and was apprehended by the Kolkata Special Task Force (STF). He met a Pakistani Intelligence Operative (PIO) on Facebook in the month of October of last year while he was employed as a courier delivery person for an international courier firm in Delhi.
The operative befriended him through a fake Facebook profile named ‘Aarushi Sharma’. The operative communicated with him and the two became friends after which they started talking on the instant messaging application WhatsApp.
She operated her WhatsApp account through an Indian mobile number. They then began having dirty talks on audio and video calls after this. The duo had a similar conversation even a few hours before the Bhaktabanshi Jha was caught.
The Pakistani operative told him that her sister was a defence journalist who worked in a news organisation and wanted the information for her. She asked him to install an application called Net Camera which tagged pictures clicked through it with their respective locations. He snapped multiple photographs of military bases in Delhi in the month of March using the application at her behest as well as shared them with her.
Authorities involved in the investigation believe that he also communicated multiple times with a male official of the Pakistani intelligence service who introduced himself as her father.
Investigations revealed that ‘Aarushi Sharma’ and her fictitious father had requested him to arrange a pre-activated SIM card to run WhatsApp from an Indian number. Bhaktabanshi Jha also provided this facility to them after he was transferred to Kolkata in West Bengal by the courier company.
He was reportedly summoned to the STF office of the Kolkata Police on 25 August for interrogation. His cell phone was seized and secret information in the form of photographs, videographs, online chats etc. were recovered from the device.
He was captured under the Indian Official Secret Information Act and other sections of the IPC and is set to be produced in a local court on 26 August. Kolkata STF and other agencies are further probing the matter to determine all facets of his cooperation with Pakistan’s agency and assess the damage caused by his anti-national activities.
The offender’s arrest is considered to have dealt a blow to Pakistan’s intelligence service and is anticipated to stop future leaks of crucial material impacting national security. Later, it was discovered that he had identified himself as an analyst in an Indian media institute in his Facebook profile.
