5 arrested for issuing threats to govt officials, scribes: Kashmir IGP

SRINAGAR: J&K Police on Saturday arrested five persons, including a Srinagar municipal corporation (MC) official, who were allegedly running an ‘intimidation machinery’ that used to prepare a strategic hit list of government officers, journalists, social activists, lawyers and political functionaries.

The police said that incriminating digital equipment were recovered from the residences of the accused.

Kashmir Inspector General of Police Vijay Kumar termed the arrest a major breakthrough as the arrested persons were “secretly working” for a blog ‘kashmirfight.wordpress.com’.

“In a J&K-wide operation, houses and properties at multiple locations, including Sanat Nagar and Raj Bagh in Srinagar, Batpora in Hazratbal, Poonch, Jammu and Hawal in Pulwama, belonging to the accused were searched. Armed with search warrants granted by competent court of law, police teams carried out searches of the suspect premises and recovered a large amount of cell phones, digital storage devices and computing platforms. In one house alone, 32 mobile phones, one tablet, two laptops, four storage devices, seven memory cards and one dongle were found.”

The IGP said that the accused are Nazish Yasrab Rehmani and Tabish Akbar Rehmani of Sanat Nagar, Sofi Mohammad Akbar of Rajbagh, Peerzada Raqif Makhdoomi of Batpora, Hazratbal, and Javed Khalid of Poonch.

“Kashmirfight.wordpress.com 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, and 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 in Pakistan,” he added.

IGP Kumar said 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.

“The blog site had designed a modus operandi wherein the name of the victim was first published, he was profiled by giving detailed justification as to how and why he is a legitimate target for the terrorists and subsequently his actual execution by the terrorists.”

Sofi Akbar is working as a secretary at the Srinagar MC.