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NEW DELHI — Security forces have pumped up their efforts to dismantle the network of LeT’s shadow group The Resistance Front (TRF) which had issued a poster glorifying the militants who had killed a Kashmiri Pandit Sanjay Kumar in Pulwama, officials said Wednesday.
The agencies are choking its fund flow and acting against its members to tear up the network in Jammu and Kashmir, they said.
Two militants of the group — Aqib Mustaq Bhat and Ajaz Ahmed Bhat — who were accused of gunning down Kumar were killed by a team of 55 Rashtriya Rifles in an encounter on Tuesday.
Kumar, the latest victim in the targeted killing of Kashmiri Pandits, was among the few of his community who had not migrated during the onset of militant violence in the 1990s.
He was fired upon by motorcycle-borne militants in his village in Pulwama on February 26 and later succumbed to injuries on the way to the district hospital, they said.
Although Kashmir Freedom Fighters had claimed responsibility for the attack, the security agencies have found TRF posters glorifying two militants, who were neutralised by security forces. The agencies believe that the militants were of the TRF hiding behind KFF mask, they said.
All intelligence resources, be it human intelligence and technical intelligence, which scans chatter across the border and among militants, have been mobilized to track operatives and financers of TRF, they said.
The two militants had holed themselves up in Jamia mosque in Padgampora village after the killing of Kumar. Based on intelligence inputs the security forces had cordoned off an area around 1.15 am on Tuesday.
“Security forces exercised extreme restraint given the fact that the two local militants were holed up inside a mosque. We were determined to ensure there was no damage to the mosque,” a senior police officer said.
During the encounter, a soldier working with 55 Rashtriya Rifles received a bullet in his thigh, puncturing a main artery. There was heavy loss of blood and the soldier could not survive, the officer said.
Recapping what had happened, he said one of the militants, identified as Aqib Mustaq Bhat, was killed on the mosque premises.
The other, identified as Ajaz Ahmed Bhat, a resident of Trall near Pulwama, jumped out, possibly from a window, and took refuge in a house close to the mosque.
His location was tracked through technical surveillance and security forces trapped him inside the house before shooting him dead, the officer said. — (PTI)
