NEW DELHI, Feb 14: Two persons were arrested and another detained in connection with the recovery of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in Jammu and Samba areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Jammu’s inspector general of police (IG) Mukesh Singh said while addressing a press briefing on Sunday.
He said the police were on high alert and had inputs that terror groups were planning an attack on the second anniversary of the Pulwama attack on Sunday after an IED was recovered near the general bus stand in Jammu earlier in the day.
“We were on high alert as we had inputs that terror groups were planning an attack on the anniversary of Pulwama attack. Last night, we arrested a person named Sohail and recovered 6-6.5kg of IED from his possession,” Singh said.
Singh added that Sohail revealed during interrogation that he was a student of a nursing college in Chandigarh and was instructed by the Pakistan-based outfit Al-Badr to place the explosive in Jammu and several other areas. He said the man who was arrested on Sunday and hails from the Pulwama district, was told to place the explosive in three to four locations.
“A person named Qazi Waseem in Chandigarh was also aware of this matter. He has been held. We have also arrested a person named Abid Nabi,” the top police officer said during the briefing.
Prior to this incident, two top terrorists had been recently arrested in the valley. Zahoor Ahmad Rather- wanted in the killing of three BJP workers and a police official in South Kashmir in 2020- was arrested on Saturday in the Samba district
While Hidayatullah Malik- a commander of the Lashkar-e-Mustafa, which is a front of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), was arrested on February 6.
“Malik revealed that several hideouts have been stationed in Jammu to spread militancy. They receive weapons from Pakistan, send them to Kashmir and other areas,” J-K’s director general of police (DGP) Dilbag Singh said at the briefing.
(Manas Dasgupta)
