New Delhi, November 26: Three terrorists belonging to the Islamic State Jammu and Kashmir (ISJK), an outfit influenced by ISIS ideology, have been arrested in Srinagar. The Delhi police have recovered weapons and explosives from their possession. The trio were planning terror activities in Delhi, a senior officer said.
The terrorists have been identified as Tahir Ali Khan, Haris Mushtaq Khan and Asif Suhail Nadaf. The police said the men, all from Kashmir, were carrying three hand grenades and two loaded pistols.
Haris Mushtaq Khan, 24, had graduated from Jamia Millia Islamia and lived in Delhi from 2013 to 2016.
“We had been working on our inputs for quite some time. We were conducting a joint operation with Kashmir police in Srinagar on Saturday when the terrorists threw a grenade at the policemen in Kothi Bagh’s Tourism Reception Center after which they were arrested,” Pramod Singh Kushwah, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Special Cell.
The special cell team also busted one of their hideouts in an apple orchard in Awantipora. Half a dozen over-ground workers or OGWs are being questioned in the Valley, the officer said.
“We arrested them before they could come to Delhi. It was a preventive measure,” he added.
In September, the Delhi police had arrested two members of the group in the national capital. Pervez Rashid Lone, 24, and Jamshed Zahoor Paul, 19, were arrested from the Jama Masjid bus stop, near the Red Fort, when they were about to board a bus to Jammu and Kashmir. They were carrying weapons, the police had said.
The ISJK had killed a sub-inspector last year, attacked a CRPF camp in July and killed a civilian on suspicion of being a police informer.
After Dawood Sofi, the social media-savvy head of the ISJK, was killed in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag district in June, the state police chief SP Vaid had said that “as such there is no infrastructure of Islamic state or something like (in the Valley) but these days people do get influenced by radical material available online”.
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