Pakistan's ISI honey traps get hyperactive on Indian social media
Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) is running a brisk business of trapping Indian defence officials through spies who pose as beautiful girls to lure Indian defence officials. A large number of such cases have come to light in the past few years.
Former BrahMos scientist Nishant Agrawal, who was sentenced to life by a sessions court in Nagpur on June 3 for leaking military secrets to Pakistan, is another prominent case of ISI honeytrap.
Pankaj Awasthi, Uttar Pradesh ATS investigation officer, said in his deposition during Agrawal's trial that one 'Sejal' had set up a Facebook account from Pakistan. Using this, she chatted with Pakistani operatives and her Indian targets, including Agrawal, TOI has reported.
For Agrawal, Sejal was a recruiter in UK's Hays Aviation. Agrawal's profile had mentioned that he was a senior systems engineer at Brahmos Aerospace. He was also Facebook friends with two other individuals, Neha Sharma and Pooja Ranjan, whose accounts too were active from Pakistan, testified Awasthi.
Agrawal had chatted with Sejal on LinkedIn too, where she showed interest in hiring him. Awasthi told the court that on Sejal's directions, Agrawal had clicked on links sent by her and installed three apps — Qwhisper, Chat to Hire and X-trust — on his personal laptop in 2017. The apps were malware that stole data from Agrawal's laptop, which contained classified information. Sejal and other spies tried to contact other defence officials too, Awasthi told the court.
In February this year, the Uttar
