A Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) militant, believed to be behind the recent attack on the Jammu & Kashmir Public Works Minister Nayeem Akhtar, was arrested on Friday.
According to the police, the JeM militant, Gulzar Ahmad Dar, who lobbed a grenade at a bus stand in Tral on September 21, which left three civilians dead and 30 injured, was held in a cordon-and-search operation at Naristan village in Tral.
Chinese pistol seized
A Chinese pistol was recovered from him, said the police. “During sustained questioning, he [Dar] admitted that he had hurled the grenade on the instructions of the JeM commander, Mufti Vikas, a resident of Pakistan, and Noor Mohammad Tantray, a resident of Darganie-Gund in Tral,” the police said.
Dar, according to the police, was earlier active with the JeM outfit in 2014.
He was arrested and released after two years in January 2017.
In a follow-up of the investigation, security forces came to know about the presence of his associates, all foreign militants, “in a hideout in Tral’s Pastuna forest”.
However, the militants fired upon the search party from their hideout and took advantage of the dense forest cover to escape, said the police.
Second bank robbery
Gunmen looted ₹1.9 lakh from a bank in Pulwama’s Ratnipora area on Friday morning, the second such incident in the past 24 hours.
Three masked gunmen barged into the branch at Ratnipora and decamped with cash. The gunmen also damaged the CCTV cameras before looting the cash.
On Thursday, ₹5 lakh was looted from a bank in the Bijbehara area of Anantnag. The police blamed the Hizbul Mujhadeen for these acts.
However, the Hizb distanced itself from the bank robberies. “We do not believe in bank robberies as it is un-Islamic and unethical. Robbing banks is not the work of militants,” said Hizb operational spokesperson Burhanuddin on Friday.