Al Badr group claims responsibility for attack

Pakistan-based terrorist outfits are coming up with a new pseudonym to disguise the real perpetrators of strikes, as a front of Al Badr, “Shohada Brigade”, claimed responsibility of the fidayeen attack on twin targets of a police station and an army camp in Jammu on Thursday.

 Intelligence agency sources suspect that Al Badr had floated this name (Urdu word Shohada in English means martyr) sometime back to introduce an element of deniability in the operation and confuse the bloody trail to local elements.

Instruction given

Security officials said terrorists outfits have been instructed to execute operations but ensure that it is not traced back to either ISI or their virtual controlled Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).

This trend was visible in the August 6 killing of five jawans in Poonch sector by Pakistan’s Border Action Team suspected to be a formation of Pakistan regulars as well non-state actors.

 The security establishment of the government believes that Al Badr along with Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) had carried out the early morning attack in the Kathua area of Jammu.

 A senior government officer said their assessment of the attack is backed by technical intercepts of August which had clearly pointed out that Al Badr was under pressure from the Pakistan’s ISI to show its performance in this side of the Valley.

  It is learnt that another trench of intelligence inputs was shared with Army to apprise them that a large number of terrorists in the group of 30 had sneaked into the Poonch, which is one of six districts along with Kathua in the  Jammu region of hilly state, sometime in August end and early this month.

Sources said a team of Army personnel had visited the border along the Line of Control in the Poonch sector to verify the intelligence input but returned to deny the information on the grounds that fencing was intact, which meant no attempt was made by militants to cross over from that region.

  The intelligence agencies had also shared inputs with Multi Agency Centre (MAC)—country’s top confidential information sharing and dissemination platform—about a month back that the neighbouring country was attempting to mobilise terrorists in Jammu region to carry out some operation as the counter-terrorism grid in this part of the state is not as well-oiled as in the Valley where Srinagar-based Army’s 15 Corps has been fighting out militancy for decades now.

The security establishment is perturbed with information that LeT wants to push dreaded Afghanni Taliban terrorists in the J&K to wage jihad as they are finding it hard to convince local Kashmiris.

Some of the Lashkar terrorists operating in Afghanistan are idle and need to be deployed in Kashmir.