Al Qaeda names new chief for India wing
The militant Islamist organisation has named another Kashmiri militant as his successor.
Srinagar: Two weeks after Zakir Musa who headed the Al-Qaeda’s India cell “Ansar Ghazwatul Hind” was killed by security forces in a fire fight in Pulwama district, the militant Islamist organisation has named another Kashmiri militant as his successor.
A video circulated by “Ansar Ghazwatul Hind’s” official media channel al-Hurr Media on Wednesday shows its spokesperson Abu Ubaidah Hafizahullah saying that Hameed Lelhari alias Haroon Abbas is the new chief of the outfit.
Hameed Lelhari, a school dropout, had joined militant ranks a few years ago and was a member of the Zakir Musa group in Kashmir’s frontline indigenous militant outfit Hizb-ul-Mujahideen.
Zakir Rashid Bhat, the real name of Zakir Musa, revolted against the Hizb in 2017 and was appointed by Al-Qaeda as the head of its newly created cell in India named ‘Ansar Ghazwatul Hind’.