by admin | May 25, 2021 | News
New Delhi : Delhi Police on Friday arrested two Kashmiri students from Punjab who were involved in hacking over 500 Indian websites, including those of the government, police said.
The accused have been identified as Shahid Malla, a CSE student at Aryan Group of College in Punjab’s Rajpura and Adil Hussain Teli, a BCA final year student at St. Soldiers Management and Technical Institute in Jalandhar.
They are natives of Baramulla and Anantnag districts of Jammu and Kashmir.
“Following a tip-off, Shahid Malla and Adil Hussain Teli were arrested on Friday when a team of Cyber Cell of Delhi Police raided their rented accommodation in Punjab,” a senior police officer told IANS on the condition of anonymity.
“During investigation, it was found that their online activities were part of anti-national hacking group called ‘Team Hackers Third Eye’ which has hacked more than 500 Indian websites, including some government websites,” the officer said.
The officer said the accused were also involved in educating Kashmiri youth to bypass state-imposed social media ban during April and May in 2017 by using VPN.
“During investigation, they were found continuously in touch with several Pakistani-based anti-Indian hackers while hacking the websites and sharing the personal information of government websites with them. Some of them are believed to be backed by Pakistani intelligence agencies,” he added.
“Through their seditious social media posts, Malla and Teli were found to be pro-Pakistan and anti-India,” the officer said, adding that some laptops, mobile phones, SIM cards, Internet dongles, memory devices and other instruments were recovered from their rooms.
The officer said the team was trying to ascertain their further plan and also their source of money. “The probe in underway.”
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
A protest by Kashmiri youth in Srinagar in August. (AP)
By Sarwar Kashani and Rajnish Singh,
New Delhi : The biggest challenge and the top priority in Kashmir are to deradicalize Kashmiri youth and militants and prevent it from turning into a Syria of India, says Dineshwar Sharma, the newly-named interlocutor for talks in Jammu and Kashmir.
An old Kashmir hand, who headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB) for two years from December 2015, Sharma says his mission to bring an end to violence would also include talking to anyone “even a rickshaw puller or a cart puller” who can contribute so that peace is ushered in the state “as soon as possible”.
He says he is personally pained to see the path Kashmiris, particularly youth, have chosen that would only destroy the society.
“I feel the pain and sometimes I become emotional also. I want to see this kind of violence ends as soon as possible from all sides. The youth of Kashmir like Zakir Musa (Kashmir Al Qaeda chief) and Burhan Wani (slain Hizbul Mujahideen commander) get hype when they talk about (establishing Islamic) Caliphate,” Sharma told IANS in an interview, referring to the new-age Kashmir militant commanders.
He said the way youth of Kashmir were moving, “which is radicalization”, would ultimately “finish the Kashmir society itself.
“I am worried about the people of Kashmir. If all this picked up, the situation will be like Yemen, Syria and Libya. People will start fighting in so many groups. So, it is very important that everybody, all of us, contribute so that suffering of Kashmiris end.
“I will have to convince the youth of Kashmir that they are only ruining their future and the future of all Kashmiris in the name of whether they call it azadi (independence), Islamic caliphate or Islam. You can take examples like Pakistan, Libya, Yemen or any country where such things are going. They have become the most violent places in the world. So, I want to see that it doesn’t happen in India.”
The former IPS officer, who led the spy agency’s “Islamist Terrorism Desk” between 2003 and 2005, was named on Monday to open talks in a bid to end the nearly three-decade-old insurgency in Kashmir.
When the IB was investigating the fledgling modules of the Islamic State in Kerala, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh in 2015, Sharma is widely known to have advocated a policy of arresting the problem by counselling and reforming, instead of arresting the potential recruits of the global terror network.
The soft-spoken intelligence veteran is known to have established friendly relationships with arrested militants in a bid to reform them when he was Assistant Director IB from 1992-94 – the time when militancy was at its peak in Jammu and Kashmir.
Serving in Kashmir as an IB man, Sharma was instrumental in the arrest of then Hizbul Mujahideen commander Master Ahsan Dar in 1993 after he broke away from Syed Salahuddin – the Hizb chief based in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
He recalled how he had met Dar in Srinagar jails and how the militant commander asked him to bring his daughter and son to meet him in the prison. “I actually took them to meet him.”
Asked If he had identified the way to reach out to the youth in Kashmir, Sharma said he was still working out the modalities.
“I am open to talking to everybody. Anybody who believes in peace and wants to come and give me some ideas how to go about, I am willing to listen. He can be an ordinary student, ordinary youth, a rickshawwala or a thelawala with some good idea. I will consider that.”
He was asked if he had started reaching out to Hurriyat leaders, who have maintained silence over his appointment even though they had dropped hints in their statements about engaging in “constructive” talks with the government of India after some of their aides were arrested in terror funding case.
Sharma cautiously replied: “Let me see. I am ready to talk to everybody. Anybody who wants to contribute to peace.”
Replying to a query that radicalisation of Kashmiri youth was a more recent phenomenon than the problem of Kashmir itself, Sharma said the state was almost at peace before the 2008 unrest over a land row and the 2016 wave of violent street protests after the killing of Burhan Wani.
“Somehow the minds of youths and students have been diverted somewhere else. That is the point of address. I have seen the violence in Kashmir from very close quarters. I was posted in Srinagar. So the kind of violence I have seen, I am really pained. I am very sad.”
Commenting on the previous attempts by the government of nominating peace emissaries and other initiatives to solve the problem, he said he would “desperately like to try some new ideas”.
“I am studying the reports (of previous interlocutors) but other than that I am trying to see some new ideas.”
Kashmir is not Sharma’s first assignment of brokering peace. In June this year, he was tasked to initiate a dialogue with insurgent groups in Assam, including the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and those representing Bodos.
Asked over any difference between his previous peace brokering assignment and the new one, he said; “The big difference is that there is not any involvement of Pakistan and any third country in the northeast.”
(Sarwar Kashani and Rajnish Singh can be contacted at sarwar.k@ians.in and rajnish.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate Jobs, Employment, Government Jobs, Private Jobs
Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti
New Delhi : Days after naming former Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma as its interlocutor for talks in Jammu and Kashmir, the Centre on Thursday said it will expedite development projects to generate more jobs in the troubled-state where some 10 lakh men and women are unemployed.
The decision was taken at a meeting between Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti here.
“It has been decided to fast track projects under Prime Minister’s Development Package (PMDP) by making encumbrance free land available for the infrastructure projects including road, power and health,” a Home Ministry statement said.
The two leaders also decided to “accelerate the development projects relating to additional jobs to Kashmiri migrants, transit accommodations, transfer of cash relief or honorarium through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) mode and provide employment to youth of the state”, the statement said.
Sixty-three major development projects have been approved in the state under the Rs 80,068-crore package. Of this, Rs 22,042 crore have been released, according to the statement.
Jammu and Kashmir is one of the states with highest unemployment rate in the country. According to government records, some educated 600,000 men and women have registered for work with employment centres.
However, according to estimates, the actual number of unemployed youth is close to 10 lakh because not all educated youth register themselves and the figure with employment centres doesn’t include those who have not passed Class 10.
The Thursday meeting which began around 11 a.m. and went on for an hour and a half was Mehbooba Mufti’s first with Rajnath Singh after the government on Tuesday said Sharma will have a “sustained” dialogue with “all stakeholders” to solve the problems in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Chief Minister arrived here in the morning along with a team of state government officers, including Chief Secretary B.B. Vyas.
The meeting was also attended by the Minister of State for Home Hansraj Gangaram Ahir and Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba.
The statement said the government decided to lay “special emphasis” for development of border areas while selecting projects under the Border Area Development Program (BADP).
“It was decided that to ensure safety of the people in border areas, construction of bunkers along the borders will be expedited.”
—IANS
