The Maharashtra Police have arrested Nida Khan of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar in a days-long search as part of a comprehensive, invasive search of the case against Nida Khan in the TCS Nashik conversion case, along with other conversions.
The arrest follows reports of suspicious religious conversion by the suspect, which in itself triggered an influx of attention and controversies across the state. Police said specially structured investigating teams had been investigating Nida Khan, who continued to stay on the same path several days after her name was linked to a suspected conversion network taking place in and around Nashik.
She had eluded law enforcement officials since the case broke, the police said, resulting in a coordinated search in several districts of Maharashtra. At last, investigators traced Khan back to Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, where she had been arrested and held for questioning. It took an extensive array of technical inputs, surveillance measures and local intelligence reports, officials said, for police to discover her after days of surveillance.
The case was first uncovered when complaints emerged that individuals had participated in controlling or pressuring those who would convert to religion in organised ways. Details of the accusations are under investigation, but police officials are said to be examining the digital evidence, financial records, communication data and links between multiple suspects involved in the case.
Officials are speculating a larger network is at work, officials within the investigation said, possibly in multiple jurisdictions. Now experts are trying to find out if Khan had to coordinate everything or if others helped the pair to reach where they appeared to be in the case. Police had also left open additional arrests in the coming days.
Nida Khan is to be taken to the local court after being arrested, and is also due to have the police keep her in custody to continue questioning her and seize additional evidence. They think questioning her might be key to getting important information about the purported operations and potentially implicated others.
The case has faced some backlash from parties and social groups in Maharashtra. A plea to take stringent legal measures against anyone charged with the crime was made, and one that rejects any possible inclination for politicisation and judicial corruption. And there’s a lot of debate on social media, a lot of folks just watch the police investigation.
At the same time, authorities have also warned the public not to promote baseless information or gossip about the investigation. A full package of investigations is continued, officials said, providing no conclusions or interpretation unless all evidence gathered in investigations is put aside.
Still, the original TCS Nashik conversion case has not halted, and the investigators proceed with the efforts to investigate the entire network and to list every person believed to be connected with the case. More is to come, after Khan’s questioning, in addition to further forensic testing of all the information gleaned until now.
