It was Sheikh Badal, the 59-year-old passport agent held today, 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 today.
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, 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.
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 today.
Meanwhile, intense grilling of Akhtar Khan and Jaffar
Khan, the brother duo arrested for their alleged links with the ISI, revealed that both had been travelling to Pakistan as well as Bangladesh on fake documents including passports, the STF officer said.
"Jaffar had applied for passport in 1989 but his application was cancelled, but he went to Pakistan in 1990. He again applied for the same in 2012 and did not mention that his application was cancelled earlier because of which he was fined by the passport authorities," the officer said.
"But the passport number he provided with his application belonged to someone else as per the records of the passport office... So there are lots of complications behind their activities. We are probing everything," the IPS officer said.