The probe into the Pahalgam terror attack has revealed that Sheikh Sajjad Gul, a 50-year-old Kashmiri and head of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba proxy The Resistance Front (TRF), is the mastermind of the April 22 terror hit at the scenic Baisaran meadows.
New Dehi:The probe into the Pahalgam terror attack has revealed that Sheikh Sajjad Gul, a 50-year-old Kashmiri and head of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba proxy The Resistance Front (TRF), is the mastermind of the April 22 terror hit at the scenic Baisaran meadows.
Holed up in the cantonment town of Rawalpindi in Pakistan, under the patronage of LeT, Gul, who also goes by the alias of Sajjad Ahmed Sheikh, has been a planner of a number of terror attacks, including targeted killings between 2020 and 2024 in central and south Kashmir, grenade attacks in central Kashmir in 2023, the ambush of J&K police personnel in Bijbehra in Anantnag, and the Gagangir and Z-Morh Tunnel attack in Ganderbal.
The NIA had designated him a terrorist in April 2022 and announced a reward of `10 lakh on his head.
The official said that during the investigation into the deadly Pahalgam attack, links and some communications have been traced back to Gul. The TRF had claimed responsibility for the attack.
The group, under Gul's instruction, had shot 25 tourists at point-blank range after asking their religion in Pahalgam on April 22. A local tourist guide was also killed by the terrorists and 17 others were injured.
Used by Pakistan's covert agency ISI as a Kashmiri face of the local Punjabi-dominated LeT, Gul was educated in Srinagar and did his MBA in Bangalore, later pivoting to a lab technician course in Kerala. He returned to Jammu and Kashmir, where he opened a diagnostic lab and started providing logistical support to the terror group.
During his work as an overground worker (OGW) for the terror group, Gul was caught by the Delhi police special cell in 2002 at Nizamuddin Railway Station with 5 kg of RDX. It was revealed that he was conducting reconnoitering targets and conspiring to conduct serial blasts in the national capital, for which he was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment on August 7, 2003.
He moved to Pakistan after his release from prison in 2017, where the ISI chose him to lead the TRF in Kashmir in 2019 to give it a facade of an indigenous terror movement of Jammu and Kashmir.
The creation of TRF was a strategy of the ISI in the aftermath of the Pulwama incident in February 2019, when Pakistan had come to the adverse notice of the world for sponsoring and harbouring terror outfits like LeT and JeM and was facing scrutiny for terror financing by FATF.
Gul's brother, a former doctor in Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital, Srinagar, was also a terrorist in the 1990s who had migrated to Saudi Arabia and later to Pakistan, where he is now involved in terror funding with fugitives in Gulf countries.
