Uri ‘terror guides’ are Class 10 Pak kids who strayed across, say family, school

NIA says probe on; no evidence to link the two to attack that killed 19

TWO PAKISTANIS arrested by the Army on charges of facilitating the attack on the 12 Infantry Brigade’s headquarters in Uri are Class 10 students who strayed across the Line of Control (LOC), the family of one and the principal of his school have told The Indian Express.

The Ministry of External Affairs said the two had confessed to facilitating the “infiltration of a group of four Jaish-emuhammad cadre who carried out the Uri army camp attack.”

Faisal Husain Awan, a resident of Potha Jandgran near the village of Koomi Kote in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and his school-friend Ahsan Khursheed, from Khilayana Khurd in Muzaffarabad’s Hattian Bala tehsil, were arrested on September 21, three days after the attack which claimed the lives of 19 soldiers. Both these villages are an hour’s walk from the LOC near Uri.

Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum, Faisal Awan’s brother and a Lahore-based physician, says the two were at home on September 17, the date GPS data recovered from the terrorists by the National Investigation Agency and published by this newspaper last week, shows the Uri terrorists crossing the Line of Control.

“I don’t want any controversy or recrimination,” says Tabassum, “which is why I hadn’t contacted the media. I am his older brother, and I am supposed to protect him. I do not know what to do. I can only hope someone powerful in India reads our story and sends these boys home.”

Basharat Husain, the principal of the the Shaheen Model School in Muzaffarabad, said Awan was a science student who had just graduated from Class IX