New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah Friday said the conviction rate achieved by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) was the highest when compared with all investigative agencies probing cases of terrorism across the world.
Responding to the list of questions and suggestions made by MPs in the Rajya Sabha Thursday and Friday, Shah said that courts have decided 157 cases brought before them and sentenced the accused in 150 of the cases.
Established in December 2008, in the aftermath of deadly Mumbai terrorist attacks by Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the NIA investigates cases concerning national security, tracking cases of Islamic terrorism, Left Wing Extremism, fake Indian currency notes (FICN), organised criminal syndicates, and offences committed in the name of Sikh separatism.
“People were questioning NIA’s performance here. They are not sitting here today. They have walked out,” the home minister told the upper house of the Parliament, in an apparent reference to the Trinamool Congress.
TMC MPs staged a walkout from the House over the Rajya Sabha Chairperson not taking up the Question Hour and Private Members’ Bills.
“There were 652 cases where UAPA [Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act] was imposed and the cases went to the Supreme Court level and it has not declared applying UAPA inappropriate in any of the 652 cases,” he added.
“Chargesheets have been filed in 512 out of 652 cases and 157 have been decided by courts and conviction has taken place in 150 out of them, marking a 95 percent rate of convictions,” Shah said. “I can proudly say that the NIA’s conviction rate is the highest among all the anti-terror agencies in the world.”
In December last year, an agency spokesperson claimed in a statement that the NIA had achieved 100 percent conviction in 2024, with the convictions of 68 accused in 25 cases and chargesheeting of 408 accused.
The agency last year arrested 11 terror operatives associated with the Islamic State, five terror suspects from Jammu and Kashmir, and 24 other suspected terrorists, according to data collated by the NIA.
In 2023 the conviction rate was 94.70 percent, it said.
Left Wing Extremism was NIA’s focus area in 2023, with the maximum number of people arrested (69), of the total 210 arrests.
It also filed 28 cases, and 12 chargesheets against 64 accused of being involved in LWE.
The home minister said that the gap between listing people as terrorists and their arrest has been reduced to a few days from an earlier timeline of approximately 2 years and three days.
Further emphasising the improvement in the functioning of the NIA under the Narendra Modi-led government, Shah said that the government created 1,244 posts, opened 16 new branches, and two new zonal offices for better functioning.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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