ATS arrests Navi Mumbai man for sharing ‘sensitive’ info with Pakistani spy

MUMBAI: The Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of the Maharashtra police on Monday arrested a 31-year-old employee of Mazagon Dockyard Limited (MDL), which builds the Scorpene submarines among other warships, for leaking ‘sensitive’ information to a Pakistan-based ‘female’ ISI operative. ATS officials said the man, identified only by his first name as Kalpesh, a resident of Nerul in Navi Mumbai, allegedly shared information about restricted areas in the country.

The shipyard, where the man was working on a four-year contract as a fabricator, also manufactures the specialised high-speed boats now used by the army in Pangong Tso in Eastern Ladakh to counter the Chinese. The ATS said that it worked on a confidential input that one individual was leaking “confidential and sensitive information” over WhatsApp and Facebook chats.

During a probe, the ATS found the accused was in touch with the Pakistan-based intelligence operative (PIO) from November 2022 to May 2023 via Facebook and WhatsApp and shared the sensitive information multiple times through those social media platforms.

Based on the revelations, the ATS registered an offence against the man and the unknown Pakistani operative at its Thane unit and arrested him.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has been adopting the entrapment route to entrap military personnel for a while, and the forces have been regularly issuing guidelines against such tactics.

This is the second case in the recent past in which a man working with a defence establishment in the city is found in touch with a Pakistani intelligence operative.

Earlier in December 2023, the ATS had arrested a 23-year-old man for allegedly sharing some confidential details with a Pakistani intelligence operative. The man, Gaurav Patil, a native of Jalgaon district in north Maharashtra had joined a defence establishment in the city as an apprentice after completing a 3-year industrial training course. His interrogation revealed that he was in touch with a Pakistani-based individual and one more person from West Bengal and had shared details of several Indian warships with them.

The Indian Navy in 2019 busted a major spy racket leading to the arrest of seven young Navy sailors based in Visakhapatnam, Karwar and Mumbai, who were entrapped through fake Facebook accounts and subsequent chats.