The NIA said it needs Riyas Aboobacker's custody for unravelling the larger conspiracy behind the case.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has been granted four-day custody of a terror suspect who was arrested last week on charges of planning a suicide attack in Kerala.
The probe agency had petitioned a special court in Kochi for the custody of 29-year-old Riyas Aboobacker, a resident of Palakkad who was taken into custody late last month. "The custodial interrogation of accused necessary for unravelling the larger conspiracy behind the case, for obtaining more evidence relating to this crime, for obtaining information about other modules - if any - involved in furthering the activities of ISIS, and also for obtaining information about other absconding accused who joined ISIS in Afghanistan," the plea filed by the NIA read.
The NIA also said that Riyas Aboobacker had been in contact with alleged ISIS sympathisers who went missing from 2016, besides indoctrinator Abdul Rashid Abdullah. According to the agency, he has admitted to planning a suicide terror attack in Kerala on the directions of other ISIS accused who are now based in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province.
"He has admitted to following audio messages from Abdul Rashid Abdullah on social media...That he had been instigating others to carry out terror attacks in India, and also that he was an ISIS member working towards its furtherance," the NIA said.
Sources in the probe agency had earlier told NDTV that they were probing whether Riyas Aboobacker has links with those behind the serial terror blasts in Sri Lanka, given that he had been following all the videos posted by main accused Zahran Hashim.
A number of people from Kerala left for Syria and Iraq to join the terror group over the last few years, becoming a cause of concern for intelligence agencies. While 21 residents of the southern state - including six women and children - travelled to Syria from various districts of Kerala in May 2016, a group of Keralites went missing under suspicious circumstances from the Gulf between December 2016 and January 2017. Some of them were reportedly killed when the caliphate fell in the following months.