Officials claimed Tuesday that security authorities had “identified the terrorists they felt were responsible for the innocent deaths in the city last week.”
Basit Ahmed Dar, a 25-year-old “kingpin” from Kulgam in South Kashmir, was among the attackers, they added. Dar, who vanished from his home in Redwani, Kulgam district, in April, “had previously been under the scanner as he worked with Abbas Sheikh, the self-styled commander of The Resistance Front (TRF), an organisation thought to be a shadow unit of the banned Lashker-e-Taiba,” they claimed.
“Dar and three others — including Mehran Shalla, a young guy in his early 20s who lives in Nawa Kadal in the city, and another young man Adil — were part of a four-member terror squad that carried out the attacks on people in the city,” according to officials.
Officials stated the group was responsible for the deaths of Kashmiri Pandit Makhan Lal Bindroo, the owner of Bindroo Healthzone; Supinder Kaur, the school principal; and Deepak Chand, a teacher at the same school in the Eidgah area of the city.
The officials said, “security agencies gathered CCTV footage from all the locations and joined the dots to zero in on the squad that was responsible for the killing of civilians, especially the minorities.”
“Basit has been travelling around in the city, accompanied by Mehran and others,” officials stated.
“After Abbas Sheikh’s death, Dar took over the TRF operations,” it is stated.
Sheikh, a resident of Kulgam’s Rampur village, joined the banned Hizbul Mujahideen group in the mid-90s and was detained and freed twice before returning to the militant fold.
In 2004, he was detained for the first time and released a year later. He was arrested again in 2007 and sentenced to four years in prison. He lived at home for three years after his release before going missing in the spring of 2014.
Early this year, he was killed in an army operation.
Officials say Sheikh was responsible for the assassination of non-Kashmiri jewellers Satpal Nischal earlier this year, leading security forces to believe the same group was responsible for the killing of Virender Paswan, who peddled ‘golgappa’ and ‘chat papdi’ in Srinagar’s Lal Bazaar.
(With inputs from PTI.)
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