Andhra Police arrested seven sailors and claimed to have busted an espionage racket having links with Pakistan.
The Intelligence Department of Andhra Pradesh acted after they tracked a few sailors and found them passing sensitive information to a Pakistani handler.
According to The Indian Express, three Indian Navy sailors were picked up from Vishakhapatnam and two sailors each were arrested from the Karwar and Mumbai naval base.
These personnel were charged with passing on sensitive information like location of naval ships and submarines to the enemy.
After the arrests were made it was revealed that all the sailors were recruited in 2017 and fell into a honey trap in September 2018.
An official, on condition of anonymity, said:
These young men were first contacted on Facebook by three or four women and lured them into an online relationship. The women later introduced them online to a man who posed as a businessman but was actually a Pakistani handler who started eliciting information from the sailors.
He explained the honey trap process further, saying:
The sailors whose chats with the women were sexual in nature were also blackmailed later to reveal the positions and movement of our warships and submarines. The sailors were also paid money every month through a hawala operator.
Claiming that these 7 sailors passed on a lot of sensitive information before they were tracked for several days and arrested, the official revealed:
These seven sailors would return from ships and submarines and reveal the locations and work they did from about September-October last year. They passed on a lot of sensitive information.
The joint operation, conducted by Andhra Police Intelligence along with other Central agencies, was codenamed ‘Dolphin’s Nose’.
An FIR was later filed against them at the Counter-Intelligence department in Vijaywada.