New York : 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. 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.
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).
Three other Ukrainians – Marian Stefankiv, Maksim Honcharuk and Viktor Kaminskyi – were arrested from the Delhi airport the same day. 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. 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).
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.
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. The accused had illegally entered Myanmar through Mizoram without valid travel documents and allegedly participated in a pre-scheduled training programme.
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