The official said the money paid to the sailors was not very big. The agency is in the process of sending Letters Rogatory or judicial request for seeking information from foreign jurisdictions to the United States for information on the Facebook accounts used to honey-trap the personnel. Once they befriended the personnel, they were either blackmailed or some willingly started bragging about their work, job profile,” said one of the officials cited above. “It appears that a particular set of women working as Pakistani agents, most likely based in a third country, were using these Facebook and other social media accounts to get in touch with the navy personnel. The NIA suspects there could be more navy personnel in the lower ranks, who were honey-trapped. Other suspicious cases are also being checked, the officials said.Īs many as 10 sailors have been arrested since the espionage racket was busted on December 20 in a joint operation of the Andhra Pradesh police and central intelligence agencies. Most of the personnel under probe had joined the navy after 2015. But the further inquiry is on to ascertain if any specifics of naval vessels or submarines of Vishakhapatnam’s Eastern Naval Command or Western command in Mumbai were shared with the ISI. The National Investigation Agency (NIA)’s initial probe into the naval spy ring busted in December has found that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), used the same set of social media accounts to honey trap sailors and paid them very small amounts of money, officials familiar with the matter said.Īs of now, the agency has found that no sensitive information could have been leaked to the ISI since the navy personnel did not have access to any classified information, the officials added.
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