Nine Indian citizens were held close to the Syria border and deported to Bangalore on January 30, according to a press release issued by the police, which added that the group had left India on December 24.
The group includes a 46-year-old man, his wife and five children from Chennai, a 24-year-old man from Khammam district of Telangana, and a 24-year-old man from Hassan in Karnataka.
According to the police, the man from Chennai has a Master's degree in Computer Science from Kennedy-Western University, California, and has worked in the United States for more than 10 years. The other men are also engineers.
Bengaluru Police Commissioner M N Reddi told NDTV that these people had neither been arrested nor detained; they were only being questioned about why they were headed to Syria. They were questioned at the airport by city police and central agencies.
In December, the police had arrested a young man from Bangalore for allegedly operating the most influential Twitter handle for terror group Islamic State - @shamiwitness. The Twitter handle had over 17,000 followers.