The number of honey-trapped Navy personnel arrested in the espionage case has reached 11 with four arrests made recently by the Andhra Pradesh Police that is probing the matter.

Apart from the 11 Navy personnel, two civilians have also been arrested in the case. The Navy personnel apprehended by the police are from the different naval bases, including Mumbai,

Karwar (Karnataka) and Visakhapatnam. After being honey-trapped by Pakistani intelligence agencies, the arrested men had allegedly passed on sensitive information related to the Indian Navy through their social media profiles.

Besides these arrests, a number of social media profiles of service personnel are under surveillance for links with suspicious accounts, according to sources.

In December, seven navy personnel were arrested for alleged espionage by the Andhra Pradesh police.  The non-officer rank personnel were posted at three different naval bases including Mumbai, Karwar(Karnataka) and Visakhapatnam.  A hawala operator was also arrested then in this connection.

All the sailors were arrested in a joint operation code-named “Dolphin’s Nose”” launched by the Naval intelligence wing, Andhra Pradesh police and central intelligence agencies.  The Andhra Pradesh police said in a statement, “An FIR has been lodged and seven Navy personnel and a hawala operator have been arrested from different parts of the country. Some more suspects are being questioned.”

The seven arrested were giving out “unauthorised information” through Facebook and other social media tools.

It is one of the biggest cases in recent past as the seven sailors were arrested from three sensitive naval bases.  While Mumbai has the Western Naval command headquarters and most VIPs land at the helicopter base there, submarine construction base of nuclear powered Arihant submarines besides the Eastern Naval command headquarters are in Visakhapatnam.  Country’s lone aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya’s base is in Karwar.

Given the sensitive nature of these three locations, the Navy along with other agencies carried detailed probe and surveillance about the kind of information leaked by the arrested sailors to strengthen their security apparatus, sources said.

Preliminary probe indicated that all the seven sailors fell into a honey-trap in September 2018 after they were contacted by some women on the Facebook and lured them into an online relationship. The trap was, most probably, set up by a Pakistani handler, according to the probe so far.

The sailors were then reportedly blackmailed and forced to give information about the position and movement of warships and submarines.

Following the busting of the espionage racket, the Navy had banned use of smart phones and social media applications and the Army warned its personnel against 150 fake social media profiles, including of phoney spiritual gurus and babas, being used by Pakistan’s Intelligence officers to honey-trap officials for extracting sensitive military information. In an advisory issued in mid-October, the Army asked the personnel to avoid interacting with unknown social media profiles.