2 ultras held turn out to be ex-teachers
Shariq Majeed
Tribune News Service

Rajouri, July 21
Two of three militants arrested by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Special Operation Group (SOG) of the Jammu and Kashmir police from the Jammu railway station on July 19, happened to be former contractual lecturers of the government institutions.

Police sources claimed that Shafiq Ahmed of Dodasan Bala, a former contractual lecturer of geography at Government Degree College, Rajouri and Khalid-ul-Haq, a former contractual lecturer of Urdu at Government Higher Secondary School, Manjakote, were escorting Abu Adil, a Pakistani Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) commander to take him for a meeting with Abu Jaffa, before the trio was arrested.

It was mainly on the information of these two former contractual lecturers that the Thannamandi-based 43 RR of the Army and SOG launched a joint operation in Kunda village of Thannamandi area to nab the LeT commander Abu Jaffa.

In the operation, Army major Bhanu Pratap Singh and SOG head constable Anjeeb Rana were killed besides two other Army jawans Gyan Prakash and Ravinder Singh and Indian Reserve Police (IRP) constable Zaffar Javed were injured.

However, Abu Jaffa along with all of his aides managed to escape from the area unhurt. Police sources said for Shafiq Ahmed, who used to teach geography till May 31 this year, this was the first terror attempt, while for Khalid-ul-Haq it was a second one.

Khalid along with his father Abdul Haq (an employee in the Public Health Engineering department) was arrested by security forces after their involvement surfaced in militancy related activities in 2002 after which they were sent to joint interrogation centre.

SSP, Rajouri, Rajesh Kumar expressed his ignorance about the involvement of Khalid and Shafiq in the militancy related incident that resulted in the death of Army major and SOG head constable.