On Sunday, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) conducted six raids in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh in a connection with a recent allegation for forcing the conversion of poor and deaf students to Islam with funding from abroad.
The raids had been conducted at various locations in the national capital and adjoining states as confirmed by the officials. During the raids, several documents had been recovered which revealed that Mohammad Umar Gautam had conducted large scale religious conversions along with his organisations throughout India. The accused organisations had received several crores of foreign funding for the sole purpose of these illegal conversions.
The UP police’s ATS had arrested Umar Gautam earlier, who ran the Islamic Dawah Centre (IDC) outfit along with this associate Mufti Qazi Jahangir Alam Qasmi, both of them were residents of Jamia Nagar in Delhi. The police also claimed that the IDC had received funds from Pakistan’s inter services intelligence (ISI) along with other foreign agencies to carry out these religious conversions.
On Saturday, the ED officials had searched these locations in Delhi as well as the office of IDC and the residences of Umar Gautam and Mufti Qazi and all the places were in the Jamia Nagar of Delhi. Whereas in UP, the offices of Al Hassan Education and Welfare Foundation and Guidance Education and Welfare Society were raided, both of which resided in Lucknow, the organisations were run by Umar Gautam and had played an instrumental role in carrying out the illegal conversions.
The UP Police’s ATS discovered these cases in the previous month, after which the ED had lodged a criminal case under the provisions of the stringent Prevention of Money Laundering Act before it launched it’s own investigation in the case.
