Bengal STF busts alleged JeM module plotting to target CM, suspect’s girlfriend held over honeytrap racket
New Delhi: A West Bengal Police special task force (STF) has arrested a 24-year-old man from Purba Bardhaman district on suspicion of working as an operative for the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed, alleging he was plotting to infiltrate a students’ protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar in a police uniform and had also been surveilling the West Bengal chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, as a potential target. The suspect, identified as Hamim Mondal, was picked up on Friday from a housing complex near the Durgapur Expressway in Burdwan, and was remanded to 14 days of police custody the following day.
A day later, the STF arrested a woman described as Mondal’s girlfriend, Arpita Sarkar, from Sahibganj district in neighbouring Jharkhand, in the early hours of Saturday. She was brought back to West Bengal and produced before the same Burdwan court, which similarly remanded her to a fortnight in police custody. Investigators allege she had been recruited by Mondal to run a honeytrap operation against the son of a state minister in Howrah, and that she was fully aware of the network she was operating within.
Addressing a news conference in Kolkata on Saturday, the inspector general of the STF, Gaurav Sharma, said forensic analysis of Mondal’s phone, other electronic devices and encrypted chat logs had thrown up what he called deeply troubling material. Investigators are now working to establish the full extent of the alleged module, including whether it had accomplices operating in Delhi or elsewhere who could have helped carry out the plan.
Jantar Mantar plot
According to the STF, Mondal had been instructed by his handlers to procure a police uniform and use it to infiltrate the Gen Z demonstrations at Jantar Mantar, with the stated aim of engineering unrest during the protest. The youths sit-in, which ran from June 6 to July 25, had drawn students, professionals and families over irregularities in the NEET-UG medical entrance examination and the CBSE’s on-screen marking process.
The agitation has ended now but the scale and visibility of the protest appear to have made it an attractive target for infiltration, investigators believe.
Sharma said the STF’s inquiry into Mondal’s devices had also revealed a broader target list that went well beyond the Delhi protest. Chief among the alleged targets was Adhikari, whose day-to-day schedule and travel patterns Mondal is said to have tracked in order to identify moments when the chief minister’s security cover might be weaker. Other leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, along with several serving police officers, were also allegedly named in the material recovered from his devices.
However, the STF has declined to release further specifics, citing the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation.
Pakistan links and handler network
Investigators say Mondal’s radicalization traces back roughly a year, when he first made contact with individuals abroad through Instagram before communications shifted to more secure, encrypted platforms including WhatsApp and Telegram. Handlers using aliases such as “Rana”, “Uzair”, “Habib” and “Abid Jatt 333” reportedly feature in the recovered chats, and the STF believes the network is connected to a Pakistan-based group associated with Shahzad Bhatti and Azmal Gujjar, which investigators link to both terror financing and narcotics smuggling.
The agency has stopped short of formally confirming operational control by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, though it has said the handlers appear to answer to that broader ecosystem.
Mondal himself is a native of Kusumgram in the Monteshwar area of Purba Bardhaman, and had for some years been employed at a garment factory in Pilkhana, Howrah, where his father also worked. He had more recently been living in Burdwan town, from where the STF eventually tracked and arrested him. The agency has said it is examining whether Mondal was working alone within Bengal or was one node in a larger, more dispersed cell.
Arpita Sarkar honeytrap angle
Sarkar, the woman arrested a day after Mondal, is known on social media chiefly for motorcycle-riding reels rather than any overt political activity, which investigators say made her a useful, low-suspicion recruit for the alleged racket. She and Mondal are believed to have first connected on Instagram roughly three to four years ago and to have stayed in near-continuous contact since, communicating across WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and X.
The STF alleges that beyond the Howrah honeytrap assignment, Sarkar was also in direct contact with handlers from the Shahzad Bhatti network herself, rather than acting merely as an unwitting go-between.
Her phones and other devices have been seized for forensic examination, with investigators saying they intend to trace her call records, chat history and financial transactions to establish whether she had links to other members of the wider network. The STF has said her interrogation is continuing alongside that of Mondal, and that both cases will likely be examined together as part of a single, consolidated investigation.
Security backdrop
The case lands amid heightened security consciousness in West Bengal following Adhikari’s ascension to the chief minister’s office in May 2026, after the BJP ended the Trinamool Congress’s three-term hold on the state in that year’s assembly election. It also arrives against the backdrop of Jaish-e-Mohammed’s long history of targeting Indian security and political interests.
The outfit has been implicated in past attacks including on Parliament in 2001 and the Pulwama bombing of 2019, and its continued use of India-based sympathizers recruited and steered largely through social media has been a recurring theme in recent counterterror cases across the country. The STF has indicated that further arrests cannot be ruled out as the investigation into Mondal and Sarkar’s alleged network widens.
