Ranjith fell for a ‘woman’ on Facebook.
By Sreekanth A. Nair
Indian cyber security cell has found that Pakistan’s intelligence agency Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and militant outfit Jamaat-ud-Dawaa (JuD) worked together to trap an India Air Force (IAF) official to obtain crucial military data.
After months of investigation, the agency has found that Pakistan used a fake Facebook profile to honeytrap IAF official KK Ranjith who was arrested by Delhi police last December from Bathinda, Punjab.
The Pak agency used a Facebook profile in the name of Damini McNaught to lure Ranjith. Damini McNaught got into contact with Ranjith through the profile pretending to be an executive working with a UK-based investigative magazine.
They started chatting each other and the conversation slowly turned into late night dirty talks. Soon, they moved to WhatsApp and started exchanging voice message and pictures. Eventually, McNaught asked the official to exchange crucial information about IAF with her for an article she was going to write for the magazine.
McNaught offered money to Ranjith for passing information. One day, she asked him about TAC-DE (Tactical and Combat Deployment Establishment) in Gwalior. Knowing the importance of the IAF base, Ranjith refused to exchange any details.
The woman’s behavior changed suddenly following Ranjith’s refusal and she started threatening him with the previous documents and voice messages he had exchanged earlier. It was then he realized that he was trapped by the ISI. Fearing the threat of exposure, he passed crucial data about IAF to ISI many times.
The investigation agency has found that the Facebook profile was operated from ISI’s base in Peshawar and from near the base of JuD.
“Ranjith shared important information, mostly pertaining to deployment, recent exercises, movements and status of aircraft. He was being used to identify each building inside Bathinda Air Force Station. After seeing Google map, she questioned him about the nature of the building. He helped them identify the air traffic controller building, the parking spots of jet planes, connecting runway and bunker for the aircraft,” an officer investigating the case told India Today.
The investigation revealed that Rs. 30,000 to 50,000 was transferred to Ranjith’s account twice for passing the information. The IAF official from Kerala was dismissed from service immediately after the arrest.