Agra (UP), Jul 21 (PTI) Two days after an inter-state religious conversion racket was busted, the Uttar Pradesh Police on Monday arrested an alleged kingpin in the case from Delhi, officials said.
Abdul Rehman, a resident of Firozabad, is the 11th accused arrested so far in the case, they said.
Agra Police Commissioner Deepak Kumar said that Rehman is the kingpin of the gang. Gang members call him “Rehman Chacha”, he said.
“Abdul Rehman himself converted to Islam in 1990 and then went to Delhi. Earlier, the kingpin of this racket was Kaleem Siddiqui. But in 2021, UP STF arrested Siddiqui and he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2024. After that, Rehman took charge of the conversion racket,” the police commissioner said.
Police have also recovered several pieces of religious literature from Rehman.
Police will interrogate Rehman after taking his remand, Kumar said.
On July 19, the state police had busted the conversion racket and arrested 10 people from six states.
The probe into the matter began in Agra in March after two sisters — aged 33 and 18 — were reported missing. Investigations revealed that they were allegedly coerced into religious conversion and were undergoing radicalization, police said.
One of the sisters had also put a picture of a girl holding an AK-47 rifle as her profile picture on a social media platform, they said.
On Saturday, Police Commissioner Kumar said that preliminary investigations found that the sisters were targeted by a gang involved in ‘love jihad’ and radicalisation.
“We also found clues about their funding originating from America and Canada,” he had said.
The Agra police have made 11 arrests so far in connection with the case.
Three accused were arrested from Rajasthan, two each from UP, West Bengal and Delhi, and one each from Goa and Uttarakhand.
“The modus operandi of the gang involved illegal conversion and radicalization bears a signature of ISIS,” Kumar had said.
The accused arrested earlier were identified as Ayesha from Goa, Ali Hasan and Osama from Kolkata, Rehman Qureshi from Agra, Abbu Talib from Muzaffarnagar, Abur Rehman from Dehradun, Mohammad Ali, Junaid Qureshi and another Mohammad Ali from Rajasthan and Mustafa from Delhi. PTI COR ABN ABN KVK KVK
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