SRINAGAR (The Thursday Times) — Police in Indian-administered Kashmir have detained hundreds of young men for questioning across the south of the valley as they hunt the gunmen who attacked a Central Reserve Police Force checkpoint in Kulgam district on Wednesday, wounding three personnel.
More than 500 people have been picked up over the past three days, most of them from Kulgam, police officers said on Saturday. Most have been released after questioning, but some remain in custody. By Friday, a senior officer had put the number at around 200 suspected “overground workers”, the term security forces use for people they accuse of helping armed groups, all of whom he said had been released.
“Most of the youth who were picked up had, at some time in the past, come on police radar for their support to terrorists,” one officer said. “They were picked up for questioning about the attack. Most of them have been released.”
The man police are looking for
Police have named Mohammad Lateef Bhat, a 22-year-old carpenter from Kulgam, as their main suspect and describe him as the only active local terrorist left in the valley. Senior officers said they had “credible leads” pointing to him and linked him to the Lashkar-e-Taiba group.
Investigators are trying to establish whether Bhat has joined other gunmen operating in the Pir Panjal mountains between south Kashmir and the Jammu region, or has recruited new members locally. “This is the time when terrorists operating in higher reaches come down towards habitations because of extreme weather up in the mountains,” a police officer said.
Police also accuse Bhat of shooting dead a constable of the police counter-insurgency Special Operations Group in Anantnag on July 21, and of killing two brick-kiln workers from Chhattisgarh in Kulgam nine days later. In August, police put up posters across south Kashmir offering a reward for information about him. They say he slipped out of a cordon in Shopian in which the man who recruited him, Zakir Ganai, was killed.
Security agencies have also questioned three suspected Lashkar workers, police said, including one they suspect of sheltering the attackers and scouting the checkpoint beforehand.
The attack and the search
The attack came at about 2:15pm on Wednesday at a checkpoint of the CRPF’s 46th Battalion guarding a bridge in the Nowpora Akhran–Mir Bazar area, about two kilometres off the Jammu–Srinagar highway, while the region’s lieutenant governor, Manoj Sinha, was in the district for a festival. Officials said at least three gunmen took part, firing AK-47 rifles from close range. Police have since ruled out early reports that the attackers came on a motorcycle and say they escaped on foot through marshland.
Two of the wounded personnel have been discharged. The third, Head Constable Sonbir Singh, who was shot in the abdomen and spine, is being treated at the Army’s 92 Base Hospital in Srinagar.
CRPF Director General Gyanendra Pratap Singh visited the site on Friday and met police and CRPF field officers in Anantnag district, and a team from the National Investigation Agency surveyed the area the same day. Joint teams of the Army, the CRPF, and the police have widened the cordon around the site, kept up searches in forests and villages across south Kashmir, and stepped up checks on vehicles, including on the Jammu–Srinagar highway.
The attack broke a long lull in attacks on security forces in the valley. It came the same week that two police officers were found shot dead in Kishtwar, in the Jammu region.
