Cops close in on man who helped Pakistani families stay in Bengaluru

Bengaluru: The Bengaluru police have zeroed in on the man who helped the members of two Pakistani families in India by providing them with fake identity documents and enabling them to get Aadhaar and passports.

Two Pakistani families, who were living under assumed Hindu names in Bengaluru, were arrested in two separate incidents earlier this week in Bengaluru. 

A senior police officer privy to the investigation said they know the whereabouts of the man who helped them with illegal documents and will arrest him soon. His links with any international organisation, if any, will be probed.

The police also suspect that more families from Pakistan are holed up in the city, who they suspect are also attached to Mehdi Foundation International. 

According to the officer, the three-member family arrested on Wednesday night received hefty sums from a United Kingdom-based bank. Numerous payments of Rs 10,000, Rs 40,000 and Rs 80,000 have been made to the suspects’ bank accounts at different intervals. In addition, the arrested family also possessed UPI IDs for receiving money through multiple transactions, essentially from Indian accounts.

The police are scanning hundreds of pages of bank statements and trying to estimate the money they received. They are also trying to probe what they did with the money. 

Efforts are underway to nab the man behind MFI operations in Bengaluru and establish the money trail as both the busted families had a sense of financial security in the form of salaries and business income.

“In the most recent case, the husband had an oil business and the wife ran a kitchen. They wanted to engage in some activity to conceal their identity,” said the officer.

“MFI does not subscribe to the classic Islam model of praying five times a day. They also believe that the founder of Mehdi is not dead, but will be reborn in different avatars and this is precisely why they want to keep the preaching alive, hoping that he will return in some avatar,” explained a senior city police officer. 

The officer also confirmed that most of the preaching is done online and never in person. “This helped them conceal their identities,” he added.   

A perspective 

A retired police officer, who was involved in investigating illegal immigrants, explained that the pattern of immigration for decades has always been through the porous Bangladesh and Nepal borders. At borders, helping people migrate is essentially a service.

Middlemen, who are aware of spaces with lax security, help people wanting to cross the border. People, who would earlier pay a meagre Rs 500 to cross the border, are now willing to shell out anything between Rs 30,000 and Rs 50,000. 

He said that in many cases, a few religious trusts also send people to India to spread their beliefs. He said that such trusts arrange for everything, including crossing over, stay and the migrants’ expenses.

What next? 

The police said it is too early to attach any “terror angle” to families. The police have also said any assumption that these arrested people are dangerous just because they are from Pakistan would be hasty.

“They have left their country because of persecution and because they can’t live there in those conditions. They don’t belong to any extremist groups and don’t advocate violence. They have been quietly living their lives here. Any suspicions to the contrary should first be confirmed,” said the officer. 

He added, “The next step is to deport them. But any step in this regard will have to be taken in concurrence with the courts. Since some of their passports have been destroyed, we will have to contact the Pakistani embassy and establish their identities and the embassy will have to accept that they are their people before they can be deported.”