NIA: IS sympathisers use safe mail

Hyderabad: National Investigation Agency (NIA) officials have said that the arrested IS sympathisers had used encrypted email services to correspond with their handler Shafi Armar in Syria. One of the suspects, Ibrahim Yazdani aka Fahad, was using a domain purchased from tutanota.com to coordinate regarding explosives and terror related activities.

“Ibrahim had used tutanota.com, a secure encrypted mail, to be in touch with his handler abroad. The details of places, where logistics like weapons, urea etc. were to be delivered, were sent to him by his handler through this email,” said an NIA official.

“Fahad had procured nine Aircel pre-activated sim cards from a temporary promotional stall at Charminar bus stop. Subsequently he had purchased five Chinese mobile phones from a mobile shop there for use in their planning and operations,” said the official. “Accused Ilyas had purchased the weighing machine from a shop at Biwi Bazaar for weighing explosive precursors and chemicals,” he added.

According to the website, Tutanota automatically encrypts all data in a device. Emails and contacts remain private with this service. With end-to-end encryption, even subjects, attachments and contacts are encrypted.