New Delhi, October 22
The Delhi Police today claimed to have exposed an organised spy network, spawned by the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan, with the arrest of another Army jawan at the IGI airport here with some sensitive defence documents. This is the second incident of spying involving military personnel in the Capital.
Ritesh Kumar, a signalman posted in Leh, was arrested on his arrival from Jammu and Kashmir by a Jet Airways flight on Friday, said Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Alok Kumar.
A pen drive containing information about troop deployment in the militancy-hit Jammu and Kashmir and certain classified documents were seized from the 24-year-old soldier.
“We had specific information that he was to pass over the documents to an ISI agent in Kathmandu,” the police officer said, adding that Ritesh has revealed he was working for the ISI since December 2005 and had handed over some documents on an earlier occasion.
A resident of Bihar, Ritesh joined the Army three years ago and has been posted in Leh since then. He was
booked under the Official Secrets Act and remanded to police custody for five days by a local court.A team of Delhi Police, Intelligence Bureau (IB), and Military Intelligence (MI) officials is interrogating Ritesh to find out more about his links and the reach of the spying network in the country and abroad.
The police said that Ritesh had received two payments from his contacts, which had been identified.
Senior officers said that Ritesh had revealed the names of some of the people he was supposed to meet in Kathmandu, Nepal. Nepal has over the years emerged as a major centre of the ISI activity.
This is the second incident of spying by military personnel in the city recently. Anil Kumar Dubey, a havaldar with the Army Group Insurance scheme, was arrested at Mahipalpur in southwest Delhi on Tuesday night while allegedly passing secret defence information to a driver of the Pakistan High Commission.
Police said they had no information so far about any links between Ritesh and Dubey but further investigations were continuing.
The Pakistan High Commission driver, Mohammad Farooq, was detained and interrogated before being handed over to the High Commission after completing legal formalities, the police said.
The Delhi Police had earlier this year unearthed a network allegedly involved in leaking sensitive information from the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) to a US diplomat.
The police had arrested a former RAW official and a systems analyst at the NSCS among others on charges of spying.
