Srinagar, Jul 17 (IANS): In a major breakthrough, Jammu & Kashmir Police has discovered and arrested the culprits secretly working behind the blog site - kashmirfight.wordpress.com.
Police said in a J&K-wide operation, houses and properties at multiple locations including Sanat Nagar and Raj Bagh in Srinagar, Batpura in Hazratbal, Poonch, Jammu and Hawal in Pulwama belonging to five persons were searched.
"Armed with search warrants granted by competent court of law, police parties carried out searches of the suspects' premises and recovered a large number of cell phones, digital storage devices and computing platforms. In one house alone, 32 mobile phones, one tablet, two laptops, four hard disk devices, seven memory cards and one dongle were seized," police said.
The five persons arrested have been identified as Nazish Yasrab Rehmani and Tabish Akbar Rehmani from Sanat Nagar, Sofi Md Akbar from Rajbagh, Peerzada Raqif Makhdoomi from Batpora Hazratbal and Javed Khalid from Poonch.
"It is worth mentioning that kashmirfight.wordpress.com was being run by a white-collar terrorist syndicate whose task was to prepare a strategic hit list of government officers, journalists, social activists, lawyers, political functionaries who were assessed by the syndicate to be responsible for harming the overarching objectives of furthering and sustaining the Pakistani-supported terrorist programme with the eventual aim of secession of Jammu & Kashmir from the Indian Union and its eventual annexation with Pakistan," the police said.
Police said with the arrest of the kingpins and the discovery of a huge number of digital devices and the analysis of the data therein, it is expected that the original plans behind the murders of journalist Shujat Bukhari, advocate Babar Qadri and businessman Satpal Nischal would be revealed.
"It may be recalled that the blog site kashmirfight.wordpress.com had designed a modus operandi wherein the name of the victim was first published, he was profiled giving detailed justification as to how and why he is a legitimate target for the terrorists and subsequently his actual execution by the terrorists," the police said.