Pak spying case: ATS nabs Jamnagar man

Ahmedabad: Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) officers on Sunday said they have arrested a man from Jamnagar for his role in helping Pakistani agencies spy on Indian defence personnel. The man, identified as Shaqlain Thaim, 22 from Jamnagar’s Bedi village, had provided a sim card to a man named Labshankar Maheshwari from Tarapur, Anand. Posing as an employee of Army school, Maheshwari had used the card to send tracking malware to defence personnel’s phones through WhatsApp messages.The case came to light when Maheshwari, 53, was nabbed by Gujarat ATS in Oct 2023 from Tarapur, where he ran a grocery store. A refugee from Pakistan, Maheshwari was granted Indian citizenship in 2005.
In 2022, Maheshwari and his wife had visited Pakistan where a relative named Kishor Ramwani connected Maheshwari to Thaim in Jamnagar. On his return to India, Maheshwari met two persons — Thaim, who brought the sim card and Asghar Modi, who activated it. Modi also gave Maheshwari the OTP to activate WhatsApp on that particular sim. In mid-2023, the sim was sent back to Pakistan through Maheshwari’s sister who handed it over to Ramwani.

ATS officers said that the sim was used either by a Pakistani defence officer or an intelligence agency officer who sent malware to an IAF personnel posted at Kargil, compromising his cellphone.
ATS officers said Maheshwari, posing as an employee of an Army school, also started sending messages to defence personnel asking them to download an 'apk' file, purportedly to upload information about their children on the school website. In some instances, the accused had tricked Army personnel into installing the application, claiming it was part of the govt’s 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign.
The apk file was a remote access trojan, a type of malware that extracts information from a mobile phone, such as contacts, location and videos and sends it to a command and control centre outside India.
The accused were booked under Indian Penal Code (IPC) Sections 123 (concealing with intent to facilitate a design to wage war against govt) and 121-A (conspiracy to wage war against govt) and various sections of the Information Technology Act.