Delhi: ‘Pulwama strike planned to avenge personal loss’

NEW DELHI: On October 30, 2018, security forces had gunned down two Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists in the Kashmir Valley. One of them was Usman Haider, a highly trained sniper armed with an American M4 rifle. The other was Shaukat. While Usman was the nephew of Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar, Shaukat was the Man Friday of Jaish commander Mudassir Khan.
The roots of the Pulwama attack lay in this encounter and the people associated with it, investigation has indicated.

Mudassir had been elevated as a commander after Noor Mohammad Tantray, a four feet tall terrorist also known as Noora Trali, was killed in 2017. Tantray was arrested in 2003 by special cell and sentenced to life in 2011. He got a 15-day parole in 2015, which he jumped. He was gunned down on December 26, 2017 after he emerged as the chief architect of numerous strikes including an attack on a BSF camp near Srinagar airport in October 2017 and a grenade attack on a minister’s cavalcade in Tral in September.
At a press briefing post his encounter, J&K Police had said that Tantray and his associates were planning to attack a convoy on the Srinagar-Jammu highway which had been foiled.
With Mudassir as chief, JeM operatives carried out a suicide attack at an army camp in Sunjawan, Jammu on February 10, 2018. Then on April 25, security forces gunned down the Jaish module involved in the attack. Among the four dead terrorists was Ishfaq, brother of Sajjad Khan. Ishfaq and Mudassir were close friends.
Barely six months later, Mudassir lost his second friend, Shaukat, in another encounter. Mudassir took these deaths personally and vowed revenge. And so did Masood Azhar, who released two statements regarding this. After the killing of Talha Rasheed in 2017, Usman was the second nephew that Azhar lost.
And thus, planning of the “biggest ever” attack began in November first week. Azhar sent in a number of force multipliers for Mudassir through POK-based launchpads. They were identified as Abdul Rasheed Ghazi, an Afghan war veteran and an IED specialist, Kamran, Umair and Ibrahim Lambu — an Afghan warrior who was earlier the bodyguard of Azhar’s brother, Rauf Asgar. They planned to carry out a vehicle-borne IED attack, something unheard of in the Valley, but something that was an improvisation of a plan originally conceived by Trali.
A relatively unknown terrorist named Adil Dar was chosen to execute it. So, Sajjad Bhat (also killed on March 11) procured an Eeco on February 4, 10 days before the Pulwama attack. It was a ‘safe’ vehicle as it had been sold seven times before. The rest, they say, is history.