Srinagar/New Delhi, May 26: National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Saturday arrested a Kupwara resident, who it said was an operative of Jaish-e-Muhammad, for his alleged complicity in Nagrota army camp attack case.
The NIA today took the custody of alleged JeM operative Muneer-ul-Hassan Qadri, a resident of Hurhama, Lolab, Lalpora in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district, from the Jammu and Kashmir Police in connection with the 2016 militant attack on an Army camp in Nagrota in which seven soldiers, including two officers, were killed.
Qadri, a Nepal returnee who was in custody of the police for sometime, had reportedly told his interrogators about his role in various militant modules, including the group involved in the Nagrota attack.
An NIA spokesman, while appreciating the role of the Jammu and Kashmir Police, said, Qadri, a resident of Lolab in north Kashmir, was arrested for his alleged involvement in the militant attack on the Army camp on November 29, 2016, in which seven Army personnel were killed and three others injured.
Three Pakistani militants who carried out the attack were also killed in the subsequent operation and a huge quantity of firearms, ammunition, explosives and other articles were seized from them, he said.
Preliminary interrogation of the accused revealed that “the attack was carried out by the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), a banned terror group, in furtherance of a well planned conspiracy from Pakistan,” the spokesman said.
The accused is claimed to have told the interrogators that he along with other Valley-based JeM operatives were in touch with the JeM leadership in Pakistan and had received a freshly “infiltrated group” of three Pakistani militants from the Samba sector a day before the attack.
They subsequently stayed at a hotel in Jammu and then left the attackers outside the army camp in Nagrota late at night, and proceeded to the Kashmir Valley, the spokesman said.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had registered a case into the incident in December 2016 for offences under sections 120B, 121, 307 of the Ranbir Penal Code (RPC) and sections seven and 27 of the Arms Act, 1958.
