Srinagar: Security agencies Tuesday “identified the terrorists they believed were behind the civilian killings in the city last week,” officials said here.
They said the attackers included their 25-year-old “kingpin” Basit Ahmed Dar, a resident of Kulgam in South Kashmir. They said that Dar, who disappeared from his home in Redwani in Kulgam district in April, “had been under the scanner earlier also as he worked with Abbas Sheikh, the self-styled chief of The Resistance Front (TRF), an organisation believed to be a shadow outfit of the banned Lashker-e-Taiba.”
According to officials, “Dar and three others — including Mehran Shalla, a youth in his early 20s and a resident of Nawa Kadal in downtown city, and another young man Adil — were part of a four-member terror squad that carried out the attacks on civilians in the city.”
The officials said the group was involved in the killing of Kashmiri Pandit Makhan Lal Bindroo, the owner of Bindroo Healthzone; school principal Supinder Kaur and teacher Deepak Chand, both of whom taught in the same school located in 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.”
The officials said “Basit has been moving around in the city and is accompanied by Mehran and others.”
It is stated that “Dar took over the TRF operations after the death of Abbas Sheikh.”
A resident of Kulgam’s Rampur village, Sheikh had joined the banned Hizbul Mujahideen group in mid-90s and kept returning to the militant fold after being arrested and released twice.
He was arrested for the first time in 2004 and released after a year. In 2007, he was arrested again and spent four years in jail. After his release, he was at home for three years, before going missing again in the spring of 2014.
He was killed in an operation by the army early this year.
The officials said Sheikh was behind the killing of jeweller Satpal Nischal, a non-Kashmiri, earlier this year leading the security forces to conclude that the same group could have been behind the killing of Virender Paswan, who sold ‘golgappa’ and ‘chat papdi’ in Lal Bazaar area of Srinagar.
