Pakistani Student Sentenced To 2.5 Years In Jail For Learning Bomb-Making Via Social Media
Abdullah used the Instagram handle 'Ibn-e-Abdullah Al-Pakistani' to engage in a conversation with another user based in Iraq and sought information on how to make bombs at home.
An anti-terrorism court here in Pakistan has handed down a two-year and six-month jail term to a university student for learning to make bombs on social media networking sites, an officer said on Monday.
Lahore's ATC Judge Manzer Ali Gill also imposed a fine of PKR 50,000 on Hannan Abdullah, a human resource studies student of the University of Narowal in Punjab, who was arrested by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in 2022 on the charges of seeking information about making bombs at a social media networking site in Iraq.
"The prosecution informed the court that Abdullah was learning how to make bombs on Facebook and Instagram. He also established contacts with terrorists and a banned outfit through Facebook in this regard," Dawn quoted the FIA officer as saying.
The prosecution also submitted evidence to the court in this regard. Abdullah was on bail since 2023 and was arrested after the sentencing.
advetisement
The officer said Abdullah in 2022 used the Instagram handle 'Ibn-e-Abdullah Al-Pakistani' to engage in a conversation with another user based in Iraq and sought information on how to make bombs at home.
"While interacting with a user — 'Professional Cook 67' — on Instagram, Abdullah received basic information on how to develop explosive devices using materials like ammonium nitrate, sulfur, ammonium powder, charcoal, and other components," he said.
This conversation was being monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The FIA officer said it received a complaint against the suspect from the FBI, which provided his (Abdullah) conversations with the Iraq-based account, and the email address used to create the Instagram handle 'Ibn-e-Abdullah Al-Pakistani'.
The officer said Abdullah used to watch bomb-making videos on YouTube and searched on the American e-commerce website Amazon for ingredients mentioned in the Instagram conversations related to bomb-making.
Abdullah, in his defence, told the court he sought bomb making information only out of curiosity.
No evidence was found to suggest that he tried to manufacture any explosive materials using the information or had allegiance with any terror organisation.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed - PTI)
Watch India Pakistan Breaking News on CNN-News18. Get breaking news, in-depth analysis, and expert perspectives on everything from geopolitics to diplomacy and global trends. Stay informed with the latest world news only on News18. Download the News18 App to stay updated!
First Published:
May 26, 2025, 22:06 IST
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
40 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Jane Street slams Sebi allegations, plans to contest ban and impounding order
New York-based global proprietary trading firm Jane Street has strongly criticised India's market regulator Sebi over its recent enforcement action, calling the accusations 'extremely inflammatory' and stating it is 'beyond disappointed' by the order. The firm, which is among the largest players on Wall Street, said in a mail to its employees that it is preparing a formal response to the Securities and Exchange Board of India's (Sebi) decision, which includes a ban on the firm's market participation and an order to impound Rs 4,843 crore in what the regulator described as 'unlawful gains'. Jane Street rejected the market watchdog's charge that it was involved in 'an intentional, well planned, and sinister scheme' to manipulate Indian markets through its derivatives trades, especially in Nifty Index futures. The firm asserted it would contest the order through appropriate legal channels. In a memo sent to its roughly 3,000 employees on Sunday and reported by the Financial Times newspaper, Jane Street said, 'it's deeply upsetting to see the firm mischaracterised this way.' 'We take pride in the role we serve in markets around the world, and it's painful to have our firm's reputation tarnished by a report based on so many erroneous or unsupported assertions,' the memo said. Jane Street is yet to respond to a mail about the Sebi allegations sent by The Indian Express. Last week, the market regulator granted Jane Street 21 days to file an objection to its order and request a hearing. Jane Street, one of the most prominent and successful proprietary trading firms to emerge in the past two decades, has grown into a major force across global financial markets. In its internal memo, Jane Street criticised Sebi for relying on 'a metric for market impact and trading aggressiveness which seems disconnected from actual market dynamics.' The firm argued that its trading activity on January 17, 2024 — one of the days singled out in Sebi's report — reflected routine 'basic arbitrage trading,' a widely accepted strategy in the industry. Jane Street has sharply contested Sebi's claim that it disregarded concerns raised by the National Stock Exchange (NSE), an allegation the regulator used to justify its sudden and unprecedented ban on the firm's trading operations in India. In the internal memo, Jane Street described the charge as 'especially far from reality,' stating that it had promptly halted its trading activity at the time to better understand the exchange's concerns. The firm added that it subsequently adjusted its strategies to align with the NSE's stated preferences. 'Once again, we left this process feeling that we had reached an understanding of the concerns and reflected them in modifications to our trading behaviour,' the memo said. 'Since February, we have made ongoing efforts to communicate with Sebi and have been consistently rebuffed.' According to the FT report, the US firm nearly doubled its net trading revenues to $20.5 billion last year, outpacing several of Wall Street's biggest banks. In the first quarter of 2025, Jane Street notched up net trading revenues of $7.2 billion, more than Morgan Stanley. 'Sebi's investigation was triggered by revelations from a lawsuit launched by Jane Street last year against Millennium Management and two former traders that had moved to the hedge fund. Jane Street's complaint alleged that the traders had stolen a hugely valuable trading strategy, which was later revealed to revolve around Indian options trading,' FT report said. According to the regulator's findings, Jane Street's trades, particularly in Nifty index futures, showed a clear pattern. The firm wasn't trading passively or reacting to the market — it was nudging prices upward, consistently placing orders at or above the last traded price (LTP). This pattern intensified in the final hours of trading, a critical window that often shapes the day's closing price. Sebi described it as a 'non-neutral trading behaviour', a strategic attempt to influence prices rather than simply engage with the market. And the tactic wasn't random; it followed a well-known play in the trading world: 'marking the close.' Jane Street, regulators say, was executing what's known as an extended 'marking the close' strategy — placing large and aggressive buy or sell orders near the end of the trading session, with the intention of artificially moving the closing price of a stock or index. The closing price is critical, especially on derivatives expiry days, as it determines the settlement value for futures and options contracts.
Economic Times
an hour ago
- Economic Times
Jane Street shows dangers of finance as shampoo
Securities and Exchange Board of India is probing Jane Street Group. The firm is accused of market manipulation. The regulator froze a portion of Jane Street's profits. The probe focuses on options trading of Bank Nifty. SEBI alleges manipulation of intraday prices. The regulator will investigate Jane Street's strategies for other indexes. The order highlights risks of small options contracts. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Indian consumer businesses have long understood that the key to making poor people buy more shampoo is to put a little bit in small, affordably priced plastic sachets. In the past few years, high-frequency traders have used the same formula — risk packaged for as little as 12 cents — to reap billions of dollars in profits from unsuspecting masses. The whole experiment succeeded beyond anyone's imagination, and India became the world's largest options market by volume. Then all hell broke loose imposing a temporary trading ban on Jane Street Group, one of the biggest names in algorithmic trading, and freezing 48.4 billion rupees ($570 million) of its past profits, the market regulator in Mumbai has sent shock waves through the corridors of global finance. The Securities and Exchange Board of India's interim order, which has been disputed by Jane Street, accuses the firm of running 'an intentional, well-planned and sinister scheme' of market manipulation The New York-based quantitative trader, whose spectacular success in Indian equity derivatives garnered $2.3 billion in net revenue last year, according to a Bloomberg News report in May, said it will further engage with the SEBI . Jane Street 'is committed to operating in compliance with all regulations in the regions we operate around the world,'' it said. The company has 21 days to file its read: Jane Street to contest SEBI's manipulation charges The probe isn't over yet. The 105-page order has focused on 18 days when options on Bank Nifty, a popular index of India's largest lenders, expired with high profits for some traders. Jane Street, the SEBI says, manipulated intraday prices on 15 of those 18 occasions. On the remaining days, the regulator alleges that the group came in with 'aggressive and large' orders toward the end of trading to force the index to close in its favour. The SEBI will now probe the quant giant's strategies for other gamification of finance that began during the pandemic never quite went away. That's true almost everywhere. But more developed markets allowed people to scratch their speculative itch in the stock market — or on novel instruments like cryptocurrencies. In India, where digital assets are heavily taxed, the cash-equity market is relatively shallow, and capital controls force most household wealth to stay at home, equity derivatives became the focus of a full-blown the end of 2023, the turnover from futures and options on indexes and stocks was more than 400 times the value of shares changing hands on the National Stock Exchange in Mumbai. No other market in the world was as lopsided, as I wrote back this is what you get when risk-taking is concentrated in small sachets. The SEBI order illustrates that with an example. A day before contract expiry, the option-market equivalent of being long one underlying share worth 100 rupees may require an outlay of just 1 rupee (1.16 cents), unless the stock is expected to be highly volatile in that period for some read| Jane Street Exit: Why Nuvama could feel the heat while BSE stays largely unscathed To command the same economic interest for 24 hours as an ordinary stock by paying 1/100th of its price is leverage, a feature not a bug. But the never-ending carnival of options expiring through the week, as had started to happen before the regulator came cracking its whip, was avoidable. As were small contract sizes that lured young men with dreams of quick riches. (Most individuals dabbling in derivatives are men, from the 20-to-30-year-old age group.)Belatedly, some of those infirmities have been addressed, and the ardour has cooled. The Jane Street order will do the rest. Once the shock has been absorbed, the regulator should ban contracts that expire more frequently than once a month. But before the SEBI staff start passing around cigars, they should perhaps recognize what they haven't done yet: Make cash equity great way to do that is by broadening participation. Now may be the time to give individual investors overseas the same unfettered access to cash equity as locals, according to Andrew Peretti, a former buy-side trader in Indian markets. A deeper stock-borrowing-and-lending pool, he says, will make it easy to short overpriced shares. Finally, corporate power needs to be reined in. No analyst wants to be thrown into jail for a 'sell' recommendation. A robust cash-equity market is the best protection against potential manipulation from higher derivative the Sebi order will also end the $500,000 pay packages for local engineering graduates at high-frequency trading shops. India needs more young talent in science and technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. R.H. Patil, who ushered in a modern equity market in India by setting up the National Stock Exchange in 1994, cautioned about letting speculation dominate everything else. 'All those who talk of totally free markets do not recognize that we need broad-based industrialization and infrastructure development to tackle poverty,' he wrote in then, Patil was upset with the regulator for fueling a runaway craze for single-stock futures. The post-pandemic frenzy has been a lot worse. The Sebi's own research pegs three-year losses for retail players at $21 billion. Nine out of 10 derivative traders have lost money. At the very least, the Jane Street investigation should help them understand why they had no chance of winning against the time the punters feel tempted by a 1 rupee option on a 100-rupee share, they should instead buy 5.5 millilitres of Unilever Plc's Sunsilk. Options can sting a lot more than a bit of shampoo in the eye.
India Today
an hour ago
- India Today
MNS leader's son quizzed for 6 hours, says he consumed alcohol before joyride
The son of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) leader Javed Shaikh, Rahil, who got into a tiff with Mumbai-based influencer Rajshree More after hitting her car in a drunken state, has admitted to drinking heavily at a friend's house on Sunday before his mother called and asked him to come home, Mumbai Police sources told India Today a drunken state, he hit Rajshree's car in Mumbai's Lokhandwala and then misbehaved with her. Rahil, a resident of Thane, was questioned for six hours, during which his father was present, the sources filed a complaint with the Amboli police and demanded strict action against Rahil. She said that she felt threatened during the incident. A close friend of Rakhi Sawant, Rajshree, made headlinesfew weeks back after she posted a video on social media where she made contentious comments about the local Maharashtrian the video, she questioned the efforts to enforce the Marathi language on the state's residents and argued that local Marathi people should instead be motivated to work also warned that Mumbai's local Marathi community's condition could worsen if migrants left the SENA LEADER CONDEMNS INCIDENTAfter the matter came to light, Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde) leader Sanjay Nirupam condemned the incident and slammed Rahil for his indecent behaviour with a woman."MNS leader Javed Shaikh's son has misbehaved with a woman. He rammed his car into hers and was drunk. What kind of Muslim is he who consumes alcohol? When the woman resisted, he abused her and flaunted his father's position," Nirupam said in a video message on added that the MNS is resorting to hooliganism in the name of Marathi. "They don't care about Marathi language or it's cultural pride. If they did, they wouldn't have misbehaved with Rajshri More".Nirpuam also questioned as to why only Hindus are attacked by MNS workers. He dared them to try and attack Urdu-speaking people in the name of Sena leader claimed that the MNS is running a campaign against Hindus at the behest of its Muslim leaders like Javed requested the state government to take MNS "goons" to task and ensure the safety and security of the people belonging to all sections of society in the state.- Ends
