Calcutta, Nov. 29 (The Telegraph): A college student who till last month headed the Trinamul Chhatra Parishad-led students' union at a Garden Reach college, his father and an uncle have been arrested for suspected links with Pakistani spy agency ISI.

Ashfaq Ansari, 23, has been held with his father Irshad Ansari, 52, and maternal uncle Mohammad Jahangir, 48.

Officers claimed that Irshad, a contract labourer in the port area, was a trained spy who supplied information, maps and photographs of Indian naval vessels to the ISI.

The trio have been charged under penal code sections 121 (waging war against the state), 120B (criminal conspiracy) and 489C (possessing counterfeit currency). If held guilty, they could be hanged or jailed for life.

Trinamul tried to distance itself from Ashfaq tonight. Its student wing president Ashok Rudra said Ashfaq had sometime ago been expelled for "anti-party" activities.

Officers said Ashfaq had till late October been the student union general secretary at Harimohan Ghose College, where a police officer was shot dead in February 2013 during a Congress-Trinamul clash over college election forms.

The police suspect that the trio and Akhtar and Jafar Khan, two brothers arrested from central Calcutta over the past fortnight as alleged Pakistani agents, were part of "a chain of ISI modules in Calcutta".

Police sources said Rs 4 lakh in counterfeit Indian currency had been seized from the trio. They added that the family had relatives in Pakistan.

"Irshad visited Pakistan several times on the pretext of meeting his relatives. The ISI trained and planted him as a contract labourer at Calcutta port," an officer working on the case said. "He sent them classified information and photographs of Indian naval vessels. Ashfaq has visited Bangladesh several times though he has no relatives there."

A search of the suspects' home in Ramnagar Lane, Garden Reach, unearthed maps of the Netaji Subhas Dock and the Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers establishment, the sources claimed.

The GRSE builds anti-submarine corvettes for the navy apart from fast-attack craft and other vessels. It is also in contention for a submarine-building project.

Officers said the first clue about the suspects had come when Uttar Pradesh police arrested a Pakistani, Mohammad Ijaz, in Meerut on Friday. The special task force of Uttar Pradesh police is probing the case in that state while the special task force of Calcutta police is handling the matter here.

"Ijaz, son of a government employee in Pakistan, was trained by the ISI and left Islamabad in 2013 after his father's death," an officer said. "He reached Bangladesh on a Pakistani passport and sneaked into Bengal through the Basirhat border in 2013."

Sources said Ijaz, who may have come in contact with Irshad during his Pakistan trips, put up at Irshad's home in Calcutta. Both Ashfaq and Jahangir knew that Ijaz had entered the country illegally.

"Irshad arranged a contract labourer's job for Ijaz in the port area with the help of his contacts in the Trinamul-affiliated labour union," a police source said. "Jahangir and Ashfaq helped Ijaz secure an Indian voter identity card and other documents."

The family helped Ijaz marry a girl from Ara district in Bihar who had relatives in Garden Reach. "Irshad introduced Ijaz to the girl's family as an orphan. The in-laws had no idea that he was a Pakistani," an officer said.

After the marriage in October last year, Ijaz spent two months with his in-laws in Bihar before returning to Irshad's home. Last week, he had left for Uttar Pradesh on what the police suspect was a "mission".

"He was on his way to Bareilly when he was arrested. Meerut police were tracking him following a tip-off," another officer said.

A PTI report quoted family members of the trio as saying they had been missing since Thursday morning and that the police had framed them.

Phtoto credit: The Hindu