PFI under scanner as 6 new Islamic State recruits from Kerala identified as NGO's activists

In a shocking revelation, the Kerala police have confirmed that six more persons from Kannur, including a woman, recently joined terrorist group Islamic State in Syria.

The police have also stated that all six of them were active workers of the Popular Front of India (PFI), bringing out the unholy nexus between the Islamic fundamentalist organisation based in Kerala and terrorist outfits.

The six have been identified as Abdul Ghayum, Shabir, Abdul Manaf, Safvan, Suhail and his wife Rizwana, who hail from different places in the Kannur district.

Read more: 

"Six more sympathisers of ISIS from Kannur have been identified. They are still fighting in Syria," Kannur DySP P Sadanandan, who is in charge of the investigation probing ISIS recruitment from north Kerala.

The development comes just days after news channel India Today aired a sting operation in which PFI leaders were caught on cam, admitting to encouraging love jihad and forced conversions, and using hawala money to fund the same.

The sting also shows Ahmed Shareef, PFI's founder member and managing editor of its mouthpiece Gulf Thejas, confessing that the PFI and its sister organisation Sathya Sarani worked on a hidden motive to turn India into a theocratic Islamic state.

Also read: 

The news also comes a week after the arrest of five youths with suspected links to the ISIS from Kannur. The five persons, who had visited Syria and returned from Turkey recently, were arrested on October 25 and 27 following a prolonged surveillance. 

The police are also trying to confirm reports about the death of five other suspected ISIS sympathisers from the district while fighting in Syria between 2014 and 2017. The family members of the five had received information about the deaths from their kin in the Middle East. 

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has been probing cases of disappearance of at least 21 people from Kasaragod and Palakkad districts over a period of time last year and suspected to have joined the ISIS in Afghanistan and Syria.

• Islamic State
• PFI
• Kannur
• Syria
• Love jihad
• Hawala money
• Conversions