Claiming a breakthrough in the investigations into the Nagrota Army camp attack, the National Investigation Agency on Saturday arrested one Syed Muneer -Ul-Hassan Qadri, a resident of Hurhama, Lolab in Lalpora, Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir. He has spilled the beans on the involvement of Jaish-e-Mohammad in the attack as part of a well-planned conspiracy hatched in Pakistan.
The arrest was made by the NIA based on a tip-off from the Jammu and Kashmir Police, which played a key role in the operation. The attack at the Indian Army base at Nagrota in the wee hours of November 29, 2016, was one of the most lethal attacks in recent times in which seven army personnel were martyred and three injured. Three Pakistani terrorists were killed in the operation and a huge quantity of firearms, ammunition, explosives and other articles were recovered from the slain terrorists.
Preliminary interrogation of the accused revealed that the attack was carried out by the Jaish-e-Mohammad, a banned terror group, as part of a well-planned conspiracy from Pakistan. NIA officials said that the accused confessed that he, along with other Valley-based JeM operatives, were in touch with the JeM leadership in Pakistan and had received a freshly infiltrated group of three Pakistani terrorists from the Samba Sector a day before the attack.
“This terror module subsequently stayed at a hotel in Jammu and then left the attackers at Nagrota outside the army camp late at night and proceeded to the Kashmir Valley,'' said an official.
The interrogation of the accused is continuing as the NIA and J&K police are keen to retrace the route of infiltration and find leads about the local assistance they may have received to reach the army base. The investigators are also keen to probe any similarities between the Nagrota camp attack and the other attacks on security forces in the Valley in the last two years. The accused is expected to be interrogated on these lines as well as about the JeM presence in the Valley and the terror conspiracy hatched in Pakistan.
Despite the NIA's claim of a breakthrough in the case, it may be an uphill task for the sleuths to unravel the entire conspiracy given the fact that all cross-border terror case investigations have hit a wall so far.
The fate of the investigations like the Pathankot (2016) terror probe or the Uri attack has not been encouraging for the simple fact that there has been no assistance from Pakistan despite evidence being shared with Islamabad. In the Pathankot and Udhampur terror cases, the NIA has filed charge-sheets, but the main accused are absconding, with little hope of investigating agencies laying their hands on them. The NIA has been unable to send a team to Pakistan to collect evidence in the Pathankot terror investigation, despite a Pakistani joint investigation team visiting the attack site in March 2016, in a bid to collect evidence.