India neutralised one of its most wanted terrorist Abdul Rauf Azhar, mastermind of IC 814 Kandhar hijacking in “Operation Sindoor”. He was also the younger brother of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Maulana Masood Azhar. Azhar was behind the kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. He was also JeM’s second-in-command.
Sources said Azhar was killed in Pakistan’s Bahawalpur after India struck nine terror camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) on Wednesday morning. He was undergoing treatment at a Pakistani military hospital and succumbed to his injuries. “Among those reported eliminated is Abdul Rauf Azhar-operational head of JeM, mastermind of IC 814 hijacking and a central figure in international Jihadi network,” sources said. His elimination marks a significant milestone in India’s counter-terror operations, particularly as he was one of the most wanted individuals by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
Azhar was in-charge of setting up terror camps in PoK and inside Pakistan, including Balakot, which was hit by IAF air strikes, Manshera and Muzaffarabad. He also motivates the JeM cadres, liaises with the Pakistan government and ISI, prepares JeM’s propaganda material in the form of audio and video clips, arranges funds and makes contacts with other terror outfits.
Apart from the Kandhar plan hijack, Azhar was also behind the 2001 Indian Parliament Attack, Nagrota Army Camp Attack 2003, Pulwama Attack (2019) and other cross border terror attacks. He was also behind the kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.
Intelligence sources said the banned Jaish-e-Mohammed’s terror group’s two ‘Markaz’ (centres) — its Bahawalpur headquarters and Narowal in Pakistan’s Punjab — functioned as a breeding ground for suicide attackers, had links with Palestine’s Hamas and served as a facility for hoarding smuggled NATO arms from Afghanistan.
Both these centres located on the opposite ends of Pakistan’s Punjab province were among the nine targets hit by missiles launched by the Indian Air Force (IAF) in the early hours of Wednesday, in a strong retaliation to the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22, in which 25 tourists and a local guide were gunned down by terrorists.
Sources said, the Bahawalpur centre of JeM, spread over 15 acres, is run by de-facto chief Abdul Rauf Asgar and the area has residential houses of JeM founder Masood Azhar and other family members.
Besides the M4 series, the arms and ammunition included sniper rifles, armour-piercing bullets, Night Vision Devices (NVD) and rifles fitted with NVD.
Azhar rose to global prominence with the inception of JeM in 2000. He became the chief of banned JeM in 2007. In December 1999, Azhar made his mark on the terror map when an Indian Airlines flight (IC-814) from Kathmandu to Delhi was hijacked and taken to Taliban-controlled Kandhar. The hijacking was planned as a plot to secure the release of his brother Masood Azhar from Kot Balwal jail of Jammu.
Following this, he orchestrated several more attacks on India, including the Indian Parliament attack in 2001, the attack on the makeshift Ayodhya Ram temple in 2005, the attack at the Indian Air Force’s Pathankot base in 2016, and the Pulwama attack in 2019 that killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel. He was designated as a ‘global terrorist’ by the United States (US) in 2010. After the Pathankot attack, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) sought a red corner notice from Interpol against Azhar.
The Bahawalpur centre is notorious for hoarding arms and ammunition left behind by the NATO forces in Afghanistan, the officials said.
They said Bahawalpur is often frequented by JeM commanders who were fighting in Afghanistan, and that Asgar purchases as well as smuggles consignments of weaponry, including M4 series rifles, through a network of criminals based in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which was earlier known as North West Frontier Province (NWFP).