Kochi: An NIA court on Wednesday convicted Riyas Aboobacker for conspiring to carry out suicide blasts in Kerala, media reports said.
The court will pronounce the quantum of sentence later. Riyas, 33, was slapped with cases under the provisions of UAPA and IPC.
The convict was nabbed while the NIA was probing another terror case at Valapattanam in Kasaragod in Kerala.
He was arrested for conspiring to carry out the blasts in Kerala on the lines of the one in Sri Lanka. Riyas used social media to recruit youth for executing his plans. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had arrested him in 2018 while probing another terror case. Riyas watched videos and speeches of Zahran Hashim who was the mastermind of the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka. He was also in online contact with Abdul Khayoom, alias Abu Khalid, who is accused in the Valapattanam ISIS case. He was a follower of Zakir Naik, the reports said.
In 2022, the NIA had convicted three persons for supporting the proscribed outfit ISIS in Valapattanam in Kasaragod.
They were attempting to travel out of India to join ISIS in Syria when they were nabbed. The case was initially registered on October 25, 2017 at Valapattanam in Kerala by Kerala police. The NIA took over the case on December 16, 2017.
On 21 April 2019, three churches and three luxury hotels in Sri Lanks were targeted in a series of suicide bombings killing 269 people were killed including at least 45 foreign nationals.
Photo Credit: Facebook
