MOSCOW, October 9. /TASS/. The Anti-Terrorist Squad of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and the country’s Military Intelligence have arrested an engineer working for the Russian-Indian BrahMos Aerospace joint venture on espionage charges, the Times of India reported.
"The arrested engineer, Nishant Agarwal, was a senior systems engineer at BrahMos Aerospace’s unit at Butibori, near Nagpur. In his mid-20s, Agarwal headed the Hydraulics-Pneumatics and Warhead Integration wing of BrahMos’ production department," the paper writes.
"We scanned profiles of some women on Facebook and found that a woman who impersonated herself as an employee of a US company befriended Agarwal in 2016. She later lured him to work for her by offering a handsome job and salary. Probe revealed that the profile was of a woman belonging to Pakistan," Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad Inspector General Asim Arun said, as cited by the newspaper.
Agarwal is charged with providing classified information about the BrahMos project to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and a number of other countries.
"After the arrest, the cops recovered Agarwal’s laptop, which carried information about the BrahMos project… Another laptop from Agarwal’s house has also been seized," the Times of India said.
Apart from Agarwal, two researchers from India’s Defense Research and Development Organization are also under investigation.
BrahMos Aerospace has not yet commented on the report.
