The two men posing next to the milestoneDelhi Police has taken down posters it had put up across the city on November 20, which showed two men posing next to a milestone and carried an alert that they were suspected Jaish-e-Mohammad operatives. This comes after a seminary in Pakistan claimed on Monday that the two were its students and had “never visited India”.
Special Cell sources said the inputs did not come from their agency, but they were tipped off by other agencies and as per their standard operating procedure, “they inform the public rather than risk an untoward event”.
“There are several alerts issued by various agencies. It takes a lot of time for the source information to be verified and our priority is to ensure the public is sensitised rather than risk an attack,” an official from Special Cell said.
The pictures were released two days after a grenade attack on a religious gathering in Amritsar, in which three people were killed and 20 were injured. The poster shows the two men leaning on a milestone that read: “Firozpur 9 kilometres, Delhi 360 kilometres”. Officials said they assumed the men were near Firzopur, which is 133 km from Amritsar, following which the posters were circulated. “The men were never declared terrorists in the posters,” the official added.
However, Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, reported that the two students never left Pakistan. “The administrator of Jamia Imdadia, Mufti Zahid, said both students, Nadeem and Tayyab, of his seminary were present in Faisalabad and they had never visited India,” the report stated.
In a press conference where the two boys were also present, Mufti Zahid said both of them were students of the seminary for the last couple of years. He said both had visited Lahore some days ago to attend the Tablighi congregation at Raiwind and then went to Ganda Singh border to watch the flag-lowering ceremony. He said they had taken pictures along a milestone which showed the distance to Delhi and Ferozepur and shared a picture on the social media, the Dawn report stated.
