With their apprehension, police expect to take the lid off of plans behind murder of journalist Shujaat Bukhari, Advocate Babar Qadri and businessman Satpal Nishcal: IGP Kashmir Vijay Kumar
Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir on Saturday claimed to have and busted a group involved in issuing threats to social activists, political leaders, government officers and journalists in the Valley.
The apprehensions came during multiple raids in Srinagar and Poonch districts, police said, adding that the arrested people including kingpin of the group were running a blog site: Kashmirfight.wordpress.com. In simultaneous operation at various places across the UT, police conducted searches at the houses and properties of the accused in Srinagar, Poonch, Jammu and Pulwama districts.
“Armed with search warrants granted by competent court of law, police parties carried out searches of the suspect premises and recovered a large amount of cell phones, digital storage devices and computing platforms. In one house alone, 32 mobile phones, one tablet, two laptops, four hard disk storage devices, seven memory cards and one dongle were seized,” a senior police officer said.
The arrested accused have been identified as Nazish Yasrab Rehmani and Tabish Akbar Rehmani from Sanatnagar, Sofi Muhammad Akbar from Rajbagh, Peerzada Raqif Makhdoomi from Batpora, Hazratbal and Javed Khalid from Poonch.
“It is worth mentioning that Kashmir fight.wordpress.com was being run by a white collar militant syndicate whose task was to prepare a strategic hit list of Government officers, journalists, social activists, lawyers, political functionaries who were assessed by the syndicate to be responsible for harming the overarching objectives of furthering and sustaining the Pakistani supported militant programme with the eventual aim of secession of Jammu and Kashmir from the Indian union and its eventual annexation with Pakistan,” said IGP Kashmir Vijay Kumar.
He said that with the arrest of the kingpins and the discovery of a huge number of digital devices and the analysis of the data therein, it is expected to take the lid of the ultimate plans behind the murder of journalist Sujat Bukhari, advocate Babar Qadri, and businessman Satpal Nischal.
The blog site Kashmirfight.wordpress.com had designed a modus operandi wherein the name of the victim was first published. He was profiled giving detailed justification as to how and why the he is a legitimate target for the militants and subsequently his actual execution by the militants.