American mercenary Matthew Aaron VanDyke and a Ukrainian national, who were among the seven foreigners arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) earlier this year, were released from Delhi's Tihar jail on Thursday, September 24, to travel to their respective countries to meet their families for one month, subject to certain conditions and formalities.
They, along with five other Ukrainian citizens being probed by the anti-terror agency, were allowed by the court to travel to Ukraine and the US earlier in the day. All of them have been granted default bail.
Visuals of VanDyke walking out of Tihar jail on Thursday night were published by news agency ANI.
The NIA is probing the involvement of the seven foreign nationals in a drone-warfare training camp linked to ethnic armed groups in Myanmar.
Of them, the six Ukrainian citizens were granted bail by a special NIA court in Delhi on Wednesday on personal bonds and cash deposits of Rs 1 lakh each.
The court also discharged them under sections 21 (penalty for unauthorised entry) and 23 (penalty for visa overstay and general contraventions) of the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, taking note of the compounding of offences by the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO).
The FRRO had earlier compounded the offences by imposing a fine of Rs 5.5 lakh on each. Ukrainian citizens Petro Hurba, Taras Slyviak and Ivan Sukmanovskyi were arrested from the Lucknow airport on March 13.
Three other Ukrainians – Marian Stefankiv, Maksim Honcharuk and Viktor Kaminskyi – were arrested from the Delhi airport the same day.
All seven accused in the case were granted default bail earlier this month.
On September 18, the court granted the relief to VanDyke on a bond of Rs 1 lakh and a surety of Rs 1 lakh. He later moved an application before the court seeking permission to travel to the US.
On September 23, the NIA court modified the conditions in VanDyke's bail order.
BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE CASE
Default bail is granted when an investigating agency fails to file its chargesheet within the legally prescribed time.
Initially, the NIA had registered the case against the seven foreigners under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), along with sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS).
The central agency had probed the case as involving alleged UAPA offences for 180 days after obtaining an extension from the court.
However, in the first chargesheet filed on September 8, the NIA only invoked provisions of the Immigration and Foreigners Act, while saying that the UAPA investigation was continuing.
It had said the probe under the anti-terror law was kept pending, and that it could file a supplementary chargesheet if a relevant offence was established.
The probe agency had also said a further investigation into alleged UAPA offences was largely completed, but more time was required to ascertain the complete facts, particularly in view of the import and recovery of a large quantity of drones and accessories through India.
Earlier, the NIA had told the court that the accused were being probed for a wide-ranging terror conspiracy, including assistance to ethnic armed groups in India and Myanmar, and imparting drone training to them.
According to investigators, the accused had illegally entered Myanmar through Mizoram without valid travel documents and allegedly participated in a pre-scheduled training programme involving drone warfare, drone operations, assembly and jamming technology for Myanmar-based ethnic armed groups fighting the country's military junta.
Source: ANI