A Pakistani national was arrested in Delhi on espionage charges and the Reddy Committee report on Kargil War was allegedly recovered from him, raising questions about how the highly sensitive internal document of the Army reached him.
Asim Wasim alias Samar Ali (25), hailing from Sadiqabad in Pakistan, was arrested from a courier shop in Okhla area of South Delhi on Thursday evening, when he was sending the document to Shamsuddin, a contact in the United Arab Emirates.
The envelope was addressed to a post box in Al Wagaan in Al Yan in the UAE, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Ajay Kumar told reporters on Friday. When the envelope was opened, a copy of the Reddy Committee's report on the Kargil War was recovered, he said.
The report is a classified internal document of the Army, based on an inquiry after the 1999 Kargil war wherein Pakistani troops had sneaked 10 kms inside the Indian territory in Jammu and Kashmir and set up bases in the mountains of Kargil, provoking a conflict.
Some other sensitive defence documents were also seized from him, Kumar said. A fake Indian driving licence purportedly issued from Hissar in Haryana, a pocket diary containing secret codes for communication and accomodation addresses of Pakistan Military Intelligence officers and an ATM card of Muslim Commercial Bank were also recovered from him.
Wasim's arrest comes close on the heels of the arrest of an alleged agent of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) here. Kumar, however, said there was apparently no link between the two. Wasim has confessed that he was working on the directions of Pakistan's Intelligence agencies and preliminary probe suggested that he did not acquire the report himself but from some other "sources", Kumar said.
Asked whether the role of any Army personnel was being investigated in the leak of the sensitive document, he said 'it is too early to say anything in this regard'. Wasim had entered India through Bangladesh and was staying in a rented house in Delhi's Nizamuddin area since last May.
He had visited several cities in India, including Gwalior, Jaipur and Jodhpur in the past few months and had contacts in at least 15 cities, the DCP said. Police suspect that Wasim may have sent secret documents out of India in the past also and is interrogating him in this regard.
For his operations in India, he used to withdraw money, which was put into his account abroad, using the ATM of the Muslim Commercial Bank, Kumar said.