SOURCE: Times Now Digital
A report on Monday claimed that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) received three calls from a Pakistani number last week, warning of blasts in Mumbai and Delhi. News agency IANS mentioned sources as saying that the calls later turned out to be a hoax.
NIA source suggested that the anti-terror probe agency’s control room received three phone calls at 12.35 pm on October 20. The source added that the caller claimed that Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Maulana Masood Azhar and his brother have formed a 22-member team and are plotting to attack Mumbai port and Delhi.
However, an NIA official later said that it was a prank call, adding that it should not be taken seriously.
Notably, the NIA is probing a number of cases related to JeM, its founder Azhar and his brother.
Masood Azhar was released by India in exchange for the IC-814 hostages at Kandahar in December 1999. The UN Security Council (UNSC) had designated the JeM chief as an international terrorist in May 2019, after years of resistance by China.
In August 2020, the NIA had revealed in the 13,800-page chargesheet filed in a Special NIA court in Jammu that the JeM terrorists and their commanders in Pakistan had deposited an amount of Rs 10 lakh of Pakistani currency in the bank account of Mohammad Umar Farooq, the son of IC-814 Indian Airlines hijacking case conspirator Ibrahim Athar, for carrying out the 2019 Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF troopers were killed.
