J&K Transfers 5 IPS Officers to New Cyber Crime Unit JK4C, Names Sheikh Junaid Mehmood as CEO

Sheikh Junaid Mehmood, IPS, has been appointed Chief Executive Officer of the newly created JK Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (JK4C), effective immediately. Four other IPS and state police officers have been transferred alongside him to staff the centre's leadership from day one.

JK4C is built to run cyber intelligence gathering, digital forensics, cross-agency coordination and specialised investigations under one roof, separate from the conventional law-and-order machinery already stretched across Jammu and Kashmir's districts. It aligns with the Ministry of Home Affairs' Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) framework, linking Union Territory-level cyber cells to the national cybercrime reporting portal rather than leaving district units to work in isolation. The centre's creation follows a documented rise in cyber fraud, online financial scams and digital crimes targeting women and children across the Union Territory.

Mehmood was previously In-charge Inspector General of Police before stepping up to lead JK4C outright. Sameer Sharma, who was DIG Armed Jammu, becomes his deputy as DIG of JK4C. Mohammad Yaseen Kichloo moves in from Principal, Police Training School, Talwara, to head the Administrative Wing, with additional charge of Cyber Operations. Ramnish Gupta, previously SSP CICE Jammu, takes the Cyber Investigation Wing. Shwetambri Sharma, an SP who had been awaiting a posting, is appointed to the Online Crime Against Women and Children Wing, a role built specifically around handling digital offences against vulnerable groups, including online harassment and exploitation cases that require different handling from routine fraud complaints.

Sharma leaves DIG Armed Jammu, an operational command post, for a coordination-focused role at JK4C. Kichloo leaves the Police Training School at Talwara, where he oversaw officer training rather than field investigations. Gupta moves from a district-level CICE posting in Jammu into a dedicated investigative wing. Between them, the three wing heads now cover the full lifecycle of a cyber case: first response, investigation, and the specialised handling that complaints involving women and children require.

This is a reshuffle built around a single new institution rather than a routine round of individual transfers. Jammu and Kashmir joins several other states that have already stood up dedicated cyber policing units in recent years, following a documented rise in cyber fraud, online financial scams, identity theft and digital crimes against women and children as smartphone and internet use expands across the Union Territory.

JK4C's leadership now has to coordinate investigations across every district in the Union Territory, build digital forensics capacity from scratch, and train district-level officers who remain the first point of contact for most complainants. The Women and Children wing carries particular urgency, built around what officials have flagged as the fastest-growing category of digital complaints the Union Territory has seen. Online fraud rings rarely confine themselves to a single state, which is why the I4C link matters as much as the internal command structure. That national link matters more in cyber cases than in most policing work, since scam networks and phishing operations typically span several states at once, not just one district or one Union Territory.

Until JK4C is given a permanently sanctioned cadre strength of its own, all five officers remain formally attached to the overall reserve for salary purposes even as they report for duty at the new centre — a technical detail that signals just how new this unit still is, even as its command structure is already fully staffed.