NIA chargesheets Masood Azhar's aide, J&K resident

Srinagar: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) said on Wednesday that it has filed a chargesheet against two accused, including a Pakistan national who is an aide of fugitive Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) chief Moulana Masood Azhar in a “terror conspiracy” case.

The duo had planned to unleash terror acts in Jammu and Kashmir to disturb peace and communal harmony, the agency said. It added that they were also preparing to target the security forces and non-locals or the so-called outsiders through their recruits.

In a statement issued by the NIA, the accused have been named as Muhammad Ubaid Malik, a resident of J&K frontier district of Kupwara and Muhammad Dilawar Iqbal alias Maaz Khan Kashmiri who lives in PoJK. The latter, the agency sources said, is a right-hand man of the Pakistan-based JeM chief.

According to the chargesheet filed before a special anti- terror court in Jammu, Iqbal, a resident of Abbaspur in PoJK, delivered incendiary speeches to incite youths in J&K to conduct acts of terrorism and violence. As an aide of Masood Azhar, he indoctrinated and motivated Ubaid Malik to join the JeM ranks, it said, adding his (Iqbal’s) motivating Kashmiri youths was “a part of a larger conspiracy hatched by proscribed terrorist organisations and their affiliates to carry out terrorist activities in the region”.

The agency said, “He would incite youth having a militancy background to pursue Jihad by sharing with them inflammatory audio clips and videos as well as images of Maulana Masood Azhar Alvi, showing the latter preaching radical Islam. He would also send videos related to encounters in the Kashmir Valley and would provoke the youth to pick up arms.”

The NIA took the case for investigation on June 21 last year after taking it up on a suo motu basis. “The case pertains to the conspiracy hatched by Pakistan-based terrorist organisations to unleash violent terrorist attacks in J-K with sticky bombs, IEDs and small arms, etc. to carry out terrorist attacks and violence in the Union Territory,” a spokesman of the agency said. He added that it also involved radicalisation of local youth and mobilisation of overground workers of newly floated outfits such as The Resistance Front (TRF), United Liberation Front Jammu & Kashmir (ULFJ&K), Mujahideen Gazwat-ul-Hind (MGH), Jammu & Kashmir Freedom Fighters (JKFF), Kashmir Tigers, PAAF and others.

The NIA claimed that these outfits are actually offshoots of proscribed terrorist outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), Al-Badr, Al-Qaeda, etc.