NIA files chargesheet in 2019 Pulwama terror attack case; names Jaish chief Masood Azhar

Jammu: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) filed a chargesheet on Tuesday in a special court here against 19 people including Masood Azhar, the chief of banned terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed, for planning and carrying out a deadly suicide attack on a CRPF convoy that left 40 personnel dead in Pulwama, South Kashmir, in 2019.

The “blind case” was solved by the NIA after piecing together the electronic evidence and statements of terrorists and their sympathisers arrested in different cases, officials said.

The 13,500-page chargesheet names people who were arrested from Pulwama for providing shelter and shooting the last video of Adil Dar, the suicide bomber who used around 200 kgs of explosives in the vehicle that rammed into the CRPF convoy on February 14 last year killing 40 personnel near Lethpora in South Kashmir.

This case, whose probe was led by NIA Joint Director Anil Shukla, also brings to light the use of e-commerce platforms by the planners in the terror module for purchase of high-end batteries, phones and some chemicals.

As many as seven people have been arrested so far by the NIA in this case, the officials said.

Besides Azhar, those charge sheeted include seven terrorists who were killed in various encounters and four absconders, two of whom are still hiding in Jammu and Kashmir — one of them a local and the other a Pakistani national.

Two relatives of Masood Azhar — Abdula Rauf and Ammar Alvi — have been named in the chargesheet as the main conspirators behind the case. The dead include a nephew of JeM terrorist Mohammed Umar Farooq who had entered India through natural caves at the international border in Sambha in late 2018.