Abdullah Basith, Omer Farooq and Maaz Hasan were arrested just before they were to board a flight to Srinagar.
Three students from Hyderabad who were arrested at Nagpur airport last week, have reportedly told the police they were on way to Pakistan via Kashmir to join a jihadi group. They were ready to join any group, the police said -- the ISIS, Al Qaeda or even Hizbul Mujahideen.
The students, cousins who were in college, were depending on Asiya Andrabi's Dukhtaran-E-Millat, a Kashmiri women's group, to help them cross the border and get in touch with jihadi groups, the police said.
But Abdullah Basith, Omer Farooq and Maaz Hasan were arrested on Saturday, just before they were to board a flight to Srinagar.
"Their entire effort was influenced by social media rather than by any individual. They are all related to former SIMI activist Salahuddin and being of the same family, his ideas probably influenced them,'' said Mahender Reddy, police commissioner of Hyderabad.
Though Union home minister Rajnath Singh said since Indian families are not with extremist groups, ISIS is not a big threat to India, the home ministry has asked the police not to take a lenient view of the students' activities.
Two of the students were among the four stopped in Kolkata last month when they had reportedly planned to cross the border into Bangladesh.
Despite deradicalisation and counselling sessions, they had persisted with extremist intentions. One of them, Abdullah Basith was rusticated from the engineering college where he was pursuing his third year in computer science. But he still managed to influence his cousins and persuade them to leave home, the police said.
On Friday, the three took Rs 90,000 and left home. They also left a note, hinting that they would not return. The families approached the police and lodged a missing persons' report.
From Adilabad, the students took a taxi to Nagpur and bought tickets to Srinagar the next morning.
The three have been booked for criminal conspiracy and under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and sent to judicial custody for two weeks.