5 arrested in J-K for preparing 'strategic hit list' of govt officers, scribes, activists, political party members

With the arrest of five persons, Jammu and Kashmir Police on Saturday said it has made a "major breakthrough" in unearthing a "terror and intimidation machinery" which allegedly issuing threats to government officers, journalists and others through a blog post.

Inspector-General of Police (IGP) of Kashmir Vijay Kumar said the culprits have been arrested and incriminating digital types of equipment have been seized from their house during searches.

"In a major breakthrough, Kashmir police has discovered the culprits secretly working behind the blog site kashmirfight.wordpress.com. In a Jammu and Kashmir-wide operation, houses and properties at multiple locations including Sanat Nagar and Raj Bagh in Srinagar, Batpura in Hazratbal, Poonch, Jammu, and Hawal in Pulwama belonging to five persons were searched," the IGP said in a statement.

"Armed with search warrants granted by the competent court of law, police parties carried out searches of the suspect premises and recovered a large number of cell phones, digital storage devices, and computing platforms. In one house alone, 32 mobile phones, one tablet, two laptops, four hard disk storage devices, seven memory cards, and one dongle were seized," the senior police officials said.

Five persons arrested include Nazish Yasrab Rehmani and Tabish Akbar Rehmani from Sanatnagar, Sofi Md Akbar from Rajbagh, Peerzada Raqif Makhdoomi from Batpora, Hazratbal, Javed Khalid from Poonch.

According to the statement, "the blog was being run by a white-collar terrorist syndicate whose task was to prepare a strategic hit list of government officers, journalists, social activists, lawyers, political functionaries who were assessed by the syndicate to be responsible for harming the overarching objectives of furthering and sustaining the Pakistani supported terrorist programme with the eventual aim of secession of Jammu and Kashmir from the Indian Union and its eventual annexation with Pakistan."

With the arrest of the kingpins and the discovery of a huge number of digital devices and the analysis of the data therein, it is expected that the ultimate plans behind the murder of journalist Sujat Bukhari, advocate Babar Qadri, and businessman Satpal Nischal would come to the fore.

"It may be recalled that the blog site kashmirfight.wordpress.com had designed a modus operandi wherein the name of the victim was first published, he was profiled giving a detailed justification as to how and why he is a legitimate target for the terrorists and subsequently his actual execution by the terrorists," the press release read.

( With inputs from ANI )