Sovereignty Under Siege comtinues.....

He had helped the militants reconnoitre the Parliament House several times to determine from which side they would gatecrash into its hallowed premises. And yet, the key conspirator had himself stayed away from the attack, perhaps because he had not had any prior training to undertake an attack of that scale and magnitude.

Afzal’s hanging was mired in controversy. Omar Abdullah, the then chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, described the execution as ‘selective’ and said that generations of Kashmiris would identify with him. He said that by not allowing Afzal to meet with his family before he was executed, the Indian government had set an unwarranted precedent. Kashmir was under curfew the day Afzal was hanged, and as the news broke, there was much unrest in several parts of the country, including Delhi.

On 30 August 2003, Shah Nawaz Khan aka Ghazi Baba, the JeM mastermind behind the attack, was killed in an encounter with the Border Security Force in Noorbagh, Srinagar.

Maulana Masood Azhar, the Pakistan-based founder and leader of JeM, could not be arrested and was therefore declared a proclaimed offender on 1 April 2002. Readers may recall that he had been released from custody in December 1999 by the Government of India in exchange for the passengers of the hijacked flight IC 814. However, in a major diplomatic victory, India later succeeded in getting him declared a global terrorist by the United Nations Security Council.

The identity of Tariq Ahmed, the elusive JeM operative who had played a critical role in the operation from Kashmir, was never fully established. All that was known was that he was a Pakistani. He was never arrested, and he too was declared a proclaimed offender in the case on 1 April 2002.

To be continued............