Group behind intimidation machinery ‘Kashmir Fight’ busted: Police

SRINAGAR — Jammu and Kashmir Police on Saturday claimed to have achieved a major breakthrough by busting the group behind issuing intimidations to social activists, political leaders, government officers and journalists during multiple raids in Srinagar and Poonch areas of the Union Territory (UT).

Police said that a group of five people including the kingpin were running a blog site, Kashmir Fight.

Inspector General of Police (IGP) for Kashmir, Vijay Kumar said that in a J&K-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.

“Armed with search warrants granted by competent court of law, police parties 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 hard disk storage devices, seven memory cards and one dongle were seized,” he said.

The IGP said that five persons arrested include Nazish Yasrab Rehmani and Tabish Akbar Rehmani from Sanat Nagar, Sofi Muhammad Akbar from Rajbagh, Peerzada Raqif Makhdoomi from Batpora, Hazratbal and Javed Khalid from Poonch.

“It is worth mentioning that Kashmir Fight was being run by a white-collar militant 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 militant programme with the eventual aim of secession of Jammu and Kashmir from the Indian union and its eventual annexation with Pakistan,” the Kashmir police chief said.

He said that 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 Shujat Bukhari, advocate Babar Qadri, and businessman Satpal Nischal would come to the fore.

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