Thaindian News

By Sarwar Kashani
Jammu, Sep 4 (IANS) The startling discovery of guerrillas getting mobile phone SIM cards on fake documents has set off alarm bells for security and intelligence agencies in Jammu and Kashmir who say that private telecom service providers are “overlooking security parameters to push their sales”.

Police have arrested at least eight people after it was found that many pre-paid phone connections were being used by militants to stay in touch with each other and also use cell phones to trigger off blasts.

Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) J.P. Singh, who is heading the probe, said the private telecom operators are giving out additional SIM cards using names and documents of subscribers who were already using the service.

“All this is being done to push sales. Private cellular companies are forgetting something called corporate responsibility and are overlooking security parameters which can be very dangerous,” the police officer told IANS.

“And many such connections have easily landed in the hands of militants,” the police officer said. The subscribers were unaware that their names and documents were being misused.

Singh said there was “no organised nexus between militants and mobile phone dealers”.

“No such evidence as of now is available to prove this (the nexus),” he said. Some 25,000 to 30,000 SIM cards have been cancelled following the disclosure.

Singh said the probe into the racket has been completed and charges against the eight accused will be filed soon.

Refusing to name the accused, he said those arrested included retailers of private phone companies.

The terror-ravaged state got its cellular phone service by the state-run BSNL in 2003. Private operators came a year later.

An estimated four million mobile phone subscribers, mostly having pre-paid services, are in the state where the security agencies, including the army, had initially expressed reservations against mobile phones amid fears that militants may misuse them.

Security forces are worried that they don’t know the actual figures of how many such SIM cards have landed into the hands of terrorists even as the telecommunications department has restarted physical verification of customers’ documents submitted to it by private operators.

But Telecom Enforcement Resource and Monitoring (TERM) Director T.K. Gupta refused to comment on the “confidential matter”.

The racket was unearthed after a dozen people were arrested in connection with an IED explosion in Poonch district. Five people were killed in the explosion.

Eight SIM cards were seized. Police said two were issued by Pakistani phone operator Ufone, and six by an Indian operator in the names of army personnel and civilians.

Police said none of the six subscribers in whose name the SIM cards were allotted were aware that there existed another card in their name.

Earlier, police in the Kashmir Valley had unearthed a similar racket and found that militants had forged the documents of a senior army officer in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district to get a SIM card which was used to explode an IED in which an officer was injured.

The use of mobile phones to explode IEDs is one of the easiest and widespread means of attacking security forces as the militant, who plants the IED at one place, can explode it from miles away.