A major terrorist plan to carry out an explosion at a crowded place in Jammu on the second anniversary of the dastardly Pulwama attack was scuttled with the recovery of a seven kg improvised explosive device (IED) near the Jammu Bus Stand on Sunday. Four arrests have been made so far, a top police officer said on Sunday.
“Over the past four days we were on high alert because there was general intelligence input that terror groups want to trigger a major blast in Jammu city on the second anniversary of the Pulwama attack. The security around all important locations were strengthened and checking intensified,” Inspector General of Police, Jammu Range, Mukesh Singh told reporters here.
The bus stand is a crowded place in Jammu city thronged by hundreds of people daily.
He also said that six pistols and 15 small IEDs were seized from Samba district in a separate operation.
Singh, who was also flanked by Director General of Police Dilbag Singh, said a youth was found moving in suspicious manner along with a bag in the bus stand area and it led to the recovery of nearly seven kg of IED which was, however, not activated as yet.
The IGP identified him as Suhail Bashir Shah, a resident of Pulwama district, who was pursuing nursing course in a college in Chandigarh and was assigned the task to plant the IED in Jammu by his Pakistan-based handler affiliated with Al-Badr terror outfit.
“Sohail received a message from Pakistan’s Al-Badr-Tanzeem commander that he has to place an IED here. He was given 3-4 targets to place the IED, which includes Raghunath Temple, bus stand, railway station, and a jewelers’ market in Jammu. He was supposed to place an IED in one of these places. He further reviled that after placing the IED, he was supposed to take a flight to Srinagar, where a man named Athar Shakeel Khan, a high-ranking overground worker of Al-Badr-Tanzeem, would have received him. After that the accused would have become an active member of Al-Badr-Tanzeem,” Singh informed.
The IGP said that Athar Shakeel Khan, who is a high-ranking overground worker of Al-badr, was supposed to receive Suhail at the Srinagar airport; Khan was arrested.
“His fellow student from Kashmir, Qazi Wasim, was aware of the plan and he was picked up from Chandigarh, while their another associate Abid Nabi was arrested from Srinagar,” the IGP said.
In another successful operation, he said that police seized six pistols along with a large quantity of ammunition and 15 minor IEDs while patrolling in Jang area of Ramgarh in Samba district during the intervening night of 13-14 February “We are investigating the backward and forward links of the consignment,” he said.
The IED recovery comes close on the heels of the arrest of two top terrorists from Kunjwani in Jammu district and Bari Brahmana area of Samba district. Zahoor Ahmad Rather, a top terrorist affiliated with The Resistance Front (TRF) who was wanted in connection with the killing of three BJP workers and a policeman in south Kashmir last year, was arrested in Bari Brahmana area of Samba on Saturday. Earlier on 6 February, self-styled commander of the Lashkar-e-Mustafa (LeM), Hidayatullah Malik, alias “Hasnain”, was held from the Kunjwani area of Jammu.
This development comes on the second anniversary of the Pulwama terror attack when 40 Indian soldiers were killed in 2019 after a suicide bomber rammed an IED-laden vehicle into the security convoy carrying them. Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed had claimed responsibility for the dastardly terror attack.