THANE: A swift, simultaneous operation by anti-terrorism squad teams early on Wednesday in the densely-populated Mumbra-Kausa township here and Aurangabad city led to the detention of nine youths, one of them a minor, suspected to have been radicalised and aligned to extremist ideology of ISIS."We have detained nine men and are questioning them," additional director general (ATS) Atulchandra Kulkarni told TOI. The police claimed to have strong evidence against those detained for questioning and that they were known to each other.Four youths, said to be between 18 and 24 years, were picked up from their homes in the Almas Colony in Kausa and the neighbouring Amrut Nagar pocket in Mumbra. Three of them are close relatives and two have an engineering background and one is pursuing BCom. It is learnt that all of them are followers of the Ahl-e-Hadith school of thought in Islam.In Aurangabad, ATS sleuths started rounding up five men from different areas of the old city around 3am. One team broke open the gate of a house and detained a 23-year-old suspect. The youth lives alone and is pursuing an undergraduate course from a city college. His family lives abroad. His laptop, hard disk and some books were seized.Around the same time, other ATS teams rounded up the youth's 30-year-old brother-in law, the brother-in-law's younger brother, 17, and their brother-in law, 26, from their rented houses in two different localities. Items like cell phones, laptops and literature were seized.Sources said the key suspect, under the garb of delivering religious sermons, had tried to brainwash the others and seems to have convinced them to conduct extremist activities. They were identified following a specific tip-off and subsequent electronic surveillance."They identified themselves as ATS and they began searching our house, scrutinising each and every thing, including documents, our mobile phones, including those which were non-functional. They then took my brother away," a man said outside the ATS office in Thane. A couple of mobile phones, some non-functional, and laptops, routers and some "objectionable" documents have been seized from the houses.Another detainee's brother said: "My brother is a very soft-spoken person and is a qualified engineer. We were told he was detained because of his association with a person from Aurangabad. The family had told him to snap ties with this man. I hope he is not in any trouble as he is a family person and could have been radicalised."(With inputs from Mohammed Akhef in Aurangabad)