New Delhi: The National Investigation Agency (NIA), which is probing the terrorist attack on the Indian Air Force Base there has found no incriminating evidence to suggest that it was an insider job.
A report in news18.com said on Wednesday that the apex investigating agency has ruled out any help to the terrorists either from someone in the Punjab Police or from inside the Pathankot airbase .
The NIA officials, it is believed, reached this conclusion after examining the call dumps during the days of the attack from all mobile towers around the Pathankot IAF base .
While probing the Pakistan angle in the Pathankot attack, the NIA interrogators found that there were 37 calls made between a Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) operative and the terrorists who attacked the airbase on December 31, 2015.
The examination of his call records further showed that the JeM operative was located somewhere close to the Indo-Pak International Border and that he escorted the terrorists to the border before they crossed over to carry out the attack.
Another Jaish operative, Shahid Latif, who is also a former Indian jail convict, briefed the terrorists on Indian terrain and gave them logistical information, the investigations showed.
Latif, who was convicted under the narcotics law, had spent more than 14 years in Indian jails before being deported to Pakistan. The hijackers of IC 814 had sought his release along with that of Maulana Masood Azhar. Lateef who was lodged in a Jammu jail then was shifted to Varanasi.
NIA believes Latif, who was deported to Pakistan in 2010 after completing his jail term, used his knowledge about India to brief the terrorists.
Latif, according to NIA, is also directly linked to the JeM's front organisation Al Rehmat, which is suspected to have funded the Pathankot attack.
According to reports, the NIA has given details of credit card transactions of Shahid Latif in its supplementary Letter Rogatory to Pakistan. These credit cards were allegedly used to pay for web-hosting of rangonoor.com and alqahafaonline.com - the two websites which were used to collect funds for Al Rehmat Trust.
