INDIAN anti-terrorism police questioned six men on Thursday (13), after conducting raids against alleged Islamic State group supporters in the country's south.
India has been concerned about Islamist extremists on its soil for some time, and the Sri Lanka bombings in April left authorities alarmed that the country might be at risk of an attack by jihadists.
The raids on Wednesday in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu state, came after the arrest in April of an Indian national who allegedly followed Zahran Hashim, the ringleader of the Sri Lanka Easter suicide attacks that killed 258 people.
India's National Investigation Agency (NIA) said in a statement that the "prime accused" in the Coimbatore case, Mohammed Azarudeen, 32, "has been a Facebook friend" of Hashim.
"During initial questioning, Azarudeen told us that he had plans to carry out a big attack in Tamil Nadu and Kerala (another southern state) but first wanted to hire more youths who will be ready to take up jihad," the Economic Times daily quoted an unnamed official as saying.
The NIA named five others aside from Azarudeen who, it alleged, were also spreading Islamic State propaganda on social media with the aim of attracting new recruits willing to carry out terrorist attacks in South India - "especially in Kerala and Tamil Nadu".
The NIA said Azarudeen maintained a Facebook page through which he propagated IS ideology, while other members of his group "have also been sharing radical contents attributed to Hashim."
One of them has "been a close associate" of Riyas A, alias Riyas Aboobacker, 29, the alleged Hashim follower arrested by the NIA in April.
According to the NIA, Aboobacker admitted he wanted to carry out an attack in Kerala.
Officers seized a dagger, 300 air gun pellets, 14 mobile phones, 29 SIM cards, three laptops, data storage devices as well as a large number of "incriminating documents" and pamphlets, the NIA said.
The accused were being questioned in connection with that material, but in its announcement, the NIA did not state any specific charges against them.
Army personnel stand amid the rubble following an explosion inside the police headquarters at Kohat in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on September 18, 2026. An explosion at a historic police headquarters in northern Pakistan on September 18 killed at least eight people and wounded 35 more, officials said, with the country's president swiftly blaming a militant group. Getty Images
Mourners read the holy Quran while sitting around the grave of a paramilitary personnel of the Frontier Corps (FC) who was killed during the Afghanistan-Pakistan border clashes, in Kohat on October 17, 2025. A ceasefire along the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan was holding on October 16, officials on both sides said, after dozens of troops and civilians were killed in cross-border clashes.Getty Images
