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IIyas Kashmiri one of most dreaded terrorists to step out of J&K

Ilyas Kashmiri
The encounters between Ilyas Kashmiri and the Indian security establishment started sometime in the early 90s, and he remained one of the most violent anti-India terrorists.
NEW DELHI: When Ilyas Kashmiri's name cropped up during the David Coleman Headley investigations, Indian security agencies were not surprised. For almost two decades, they have had several similar encounters with Kashmiri, one of the deadliest terrorists to come out of Kashmir insurgency.

The encounters between Ilyas Kashmiri and the Indian security establishment started sometime in the early 90s, and he remained one of the most violent anti-India terrorists, heading a powerful network that operated within Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere in India. He was part of a team that kidnapped foreigners in the early 90s in India, his men were among those who fought in Kargil in 1999, and he was David Coleman Headley's key handler.

Through two decades, Kashmiri, born in Mirpur district of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, had honed himself in the art of terrorism, and played a critical role in ensuring that Kashmir violence remained high for years.

The first encounter of the Indian agencies with Kashmiri was sometime in 1994, when he organized the kidnapping of foreigners in Delhi to bargain for the release of among others Maulana Masood Azhar, who was eventually freed from Indian jail in 1999 in exchange for the passengers of IC-814, an Indian Airlines aircraft from Kathmandu to Delhi that was hijacked and taken to Kandahar. Kashmiri's deputy in the kidnapping operation was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who is now in a Pakistani jail for the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Sheikh was also released from an Indian jail in 1999 along with Azhar in the IC-814 swap.

As the Indian security forces swept down on the hideout where the kidnapped foreigners were kept, they were able to arrest an injured Saeed Sheikh, but Kashmiri managed to escape. Kashmiri used to claim that he had been arrested by Indian forces a second time but managed to get away -- an assertion whose veracity has been disputed.

Army sources said the jehadis involved in the Kargil attack of 1999 included fighters of Kashmiri's 313 Brigade, then part of Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami (HuJI).

In February 2000, Kashmiri led a group of over two dozen terrorists to raid an Indian Army post, and he took back the head of one of the Indian soldiers. Pakistani reports of the time said he was rewarded by General Pervez Musharraf for the operation.

In 2003, his group is believed to have been behind the sensational attack in Tanda, near Jammu, in which a brigadier was killed and several senior officers including the chief of the Northern Army Command were injured.

Kashmiri was to resurface in the post-26/11 attacks of Mumbai. David Coleman Headley admitted to investigators that his main handler was Kashmiri, after he (Headley) grew disillusioned with Lashkar-e-Taiba's slow pace as well as India-centric focus. The Union home ministry is now convinced that Kashmiri was a key conspirator behind the Mumbai attacks.

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