Naveed, Noman stayed in Kashmir for 64 days

Ahmed Ali Fayyaz

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SRINAGAR, Aug 6: The captured Pakistani militant of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba has revealed to his interrogators that before the fidayeen attack on a BSF convoy near Udhampur on Wednesday, he and his accomplice had stayed and moved in Kashmir valley for 64 days.

Sources privy to the compilation of his interrogation report revealed to STATE TIMES that 23-year-old Naveed of Faisalabad had initially given conflicting details of his passage into the valley but finally he disclosed that he had crossed the LOC after cutting the barbed wire fencing alongwith Noman in Nowgam sector of Handwara Police district on June 2^nd.

After their stay in Handwara and Baramulla for some days, the duo proceeded to a village near the famous shrine of Babarishi in Tangmarg area. On several occasions during the month of Ramazan, their group of four militants, including the guide Hamza, was treated with sumptuous Kashmiri waazwaan.

Naveed, who initially described himself as Qasim and Usman, gave the Pakistani mobile phone number of his brother Nadeem which was found as real during verification by the interrogators. Unconfirmed reports said that one of the officers managed to call Nadeem with his Delhi-based cellphone and informed the receiver that his brother Naveed was in his custody.

Naveed revealed that he and his accomplice put up at different hideouts, mostly at the houses of LeT’s overground workers, in Pulwama, Awantipora and Khudwani village of Kulgam district in South Kashmir. It was in that separatists-dominated village that the militants hired a truck that carried them all the way to Samroli, 15 Km short of Udhampur, before carrying out the fidayeen attack. He claimed that he and Noman stayed in the truck for some hours of the previous night at Tamatar Morh, between Batote and Patni Top.

The interrogators are still trying to learn whether the fidayeen duo’s final destination was Samrohli only or they had been tasked with executing a suicide attack on the Northern Command headquarters of Army in the garrison town of Udhampur on the strategic Srinagar-Jammu highway.

As of now, Naveed has stuck to his story that they had to attack the Amarnath Yatra but he has not given a convincing reply as to why the militants waited till the Yatra convoy passed and they attacked a rear convoy of BSF. He has said that according to the plan, they had been asked to escape towards Sanasar heights and hide somewhere for two days and assured that one of the men from the outfit would subsequently guide them back to the Valley.

The class 11^th  dropout, according to sources, claimed to have been indoctrinated by a Tableegi Jamaat and later completed the special training of ‘Daura-e-aam’ and ‘Daura-e-khaas’ at an LeT camp in Pakistan. He said that he was inducted as a member of the guerrilla outfit after he was shown videos of fighting and “atrocities of armed forces and Police on the Kashmiri Muslims”.

Significantly, Naveed claimed that he had been launched for the Jammu mission by the top wanted LeT commander Abu Qasim who was allegedly mastermind and executor of high profile attacks on Army including the killing of eight soldiers in a daredevil attack on the highway bypass near Hyderpora in August 2012.

Remarkably, Qasim was said to be among the three LeT militants who got trapped in a gunbattle at Kakpora village of Pulwama district on Thursday evening.

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