Punish her: Mother of 25-yr-old Indian arrested on terror charges in B'desh

KOLKATA: Fugitive Ayesha Jannat Mohona spent three years in India and last one year in Bangladesh before she was arrested in Dhaka on Friday on the charges of recruiting youths and raising funds for Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), said an official of the central intelligence wing in India.

The 25-year-old woman with Hindu origin from Kolkata’s adjoining Hooghly district who changed her religion to Islam joined JMB, an outlawed terror outfit in Bangladesh.

The sleuths of the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau (SIB), the central intelligence wing, are looking for leads to track Ayesha’s footprint in West Bengal and other parts of the country since she had left home four years ago.

"Bangladesh police are interrogating her. We have been told that they would share her activities in India before she settled in Bangladesh with us. Now our prime concern is what Ayesha did for three years in India after leaving home," said a SIB officer.

The daughter of daily wage earner Pradip Debnath, who named her Pragya, left home in September 2016 saying she was going to Kolkata. "She never returned home. On the day she left home, we kept calling my daughter but her cellphone kept ringing. At night, her cell phone was not reachable. In December, she called and told that she changed her religion to Islam. We were shocked. That was the last time I heard my daughter’s voice," recounted Pradip.

Ayesha’s family members were stunned when they were searching for her photographs to lodge a missing diary on the day she had left home. "She destroyed all her photographs, including those which were clicked during her childhood, and took away all the documents related to her education," said Pradip.

The SIB sleuths came to know Ayesha had changed her religion in 2009 when she was studying in school. "She disclosed it to her family three months after leaving home in 2016. She started visiting Bangladesh from 2016 but started living there from August 19 in 2019 in the garb of a teacher at a religious institute. She first rented house at Keranigaj and then shifted to Fatullah,’’ said a SIB officer.

The central agency came to know Ayesha had 13 Facebook accounts using different names."She used to communicate using the messenger call facility of the social web portal. We are waiting for the information that Bangladesh police will share with us," said the officer.

Ayesha’s mother Geeta said she never imagined her daughter would become an active member of a terror outfit. "We tried our best to provide her education. I want her to be punished for her actions," the mother said.