Two doctors and a terror cell: What J&K police action before Delhi car blast revealed

Hours before a car exploded in a crowded market near Delhi’s Red Fort on Monday, the Jammu and Kashmir police said it had cracked open an “inter-state and transnational terror module”.Over the last three weeks, the Jammu and Kashmir police arrested seven people as part of its investigations.Among those were two doctors from Kashmir – Dr Adeel Ahmad Rather who works at a hospital in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, and Dr Muzamil Shakeel who is employed at a hospital in Faridabad, Haryana. Jammu and Kashmir police officials, who declined to be identified, said another Kashmiri doctor, working at the same Faridabad hospital, has gone missing since the arrests began.The module, the police said, was linked with the banned “terrorist organizations, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind”.Jaish-e-Mohammad is a Pakistan-based militant group headed by a globally designated terrorist Masood Azhar. It has a history of carrying out terrorist attacks in India, including the 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing.Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind was formed in Kashmir in 2017 when some militants broke away from Hizbul Mujahideen – the largest indigenous militant organisation in Kashmir – and claimed that they were affiliated to Al Qaeda. However, the group has not been known to carry out major terror strikes.So far, security agencies in Jammu and Kashmir...Read more