Sovereignty Under Siege continues...

A laptop along with accessories, one mobile phone and Rs 10 lakh were recovered from them. A team from the Special Cell rushed to Srinagar and took custody of the two accused nabbed by the Srinagar Police, seized the recovered articles and brought them back the same day. The said truck was brought back to Delhi later by another team of the Special Cell.

Afzal was a storehouse of information. He had become a militant after completing his schooling from Government School, Sopore, in Baramulla. In 1990, he joined the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and crossed over to Pakistan. He underwent extensive training for over two months at a JeM training camp located at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The camp was run under the aegis of the ISI—Pakistan’s rogue intelligence agency— which was determined to cause terror and spread chaos in India. After completing his training in Muzaffarabad, Afzal  was infiltrated into India by his handlers in March 1990. He started a small business, supplying surgical instruments in Srinagar, and visited Delhi often in connection with his work. Whenever he came to Delhi he would stay at Mukherjee Nagar with his cousin Shaukat, who encouraged him to study further through a Delhi University correspondence course.

Afzal graduated in 1994 but continued with his business, which kept him shuttling between Delhi and Srinagar.

In February 2001, he met one Tariq Ahmed at a chemist’s shop in Lal Chowk, Srinagar. Tariq struck up a friendship with Afzal and gradually motivated him to join the fight to ‘liberate’ Kashmir. Tariq confessed to Afzal that he himself belonged to JeM. He exhorted Afzal to join JeM and become a part of an important mission that the outfit had launched.

To be continued.....