Passport agent held for links with ISI

The Special Task Force of the Kolkata Police on Wednesday arrested a passport agent here for his alleged links with Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence, just three days after it busted a module of the Pakistani spy agency in the city.

It was Sheikh Badal, the 59-year-old passport agent held on Wednesday, who had helped arrested suspected ISI-spy Mohammad Ejaz alias Mohammad Kalam in Uttar Pradesh in managing a fake voter identity card, a senior officer of the STF said.

Badal’s name surfaced during the grilling sessions of Mohammed Jahangir, arrested last Sunday along with Irshad Ansari, his son Asfaq Ansari, he said.

“Badal and Jahangir have been friends for quite a long time. Jahangir was into tailoring before he started working as agent at the Regional Passport Officer here and it was there he met Badal... the two became close friends,” the IPS officer said. Badal, a resident of the Karaya area in south-east part of the city, according to the officer, has a complicated family history.

“It’s only a few hours that we have arrested him. But going by the preliminary questioning we have found that Badal was born in India, but moved to Bangladesh where he got married and had a son who died in a political violence when he was 15 years old. After that Badal returned to India and again got married to a local lady,” the officer said.

But he has been a frequent visitor to Dhaka, the purpose was still unknown, he said adding that several “incriminating documents” were seized from him.

Badal was arrested from in front of the Regional Passport office on Brabourne Road in the central business district of the city at around 2.30 pm on Wednesday.

He has been booked under the Indian Penal Code sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 121 (waging or attempting to wage war or abetting waging of war against the Government of India), 121A (conspiracy to commit offences punishable by section 121), 489B (using as genuine forged or counterfeit currency notes or bank notes) and 489C (possession of forged or counterfeit currency-notes or bank-notes).