NIA charge sheets close associate of JeM chief Masood Azhar

Muhammad Dilawar Iqbal, a resident of Abbaspur in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir who goes by many aliases including Maaz Khan Kashmiri and Azad Kashmiri, delivered incendiary speeches to incite youths in the Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir to conduct terrorist acts, the agency said in a statement.

In the charge sheet filed in a special court in Jammu, the NIA alleged that Dilawar Iqbal was a close associate of Masood Azhar and had indoctrinated and motivated Ubaid Malik to join the JeM militant ranks. The agency has alleged that Dilawar Iqbal was motivating Kashmiri youths as part of a larger conspiracy hatched by proscribed terrorist organisations and their affiliates to carry out terrorist activities in the region.

"Dilwar would incite youth having a militancy background to pursue Jihad by sharing with them inflammatory audio clips and videos as well as images of Maulana Masood Azhar Alvi, showing the latter preaching radical Islam. "He would also send videos related to encounters in the Kashmir valley and would provoke the youth to pick up arms," an NIA spokesperson said.

The agency has been probing the terror conspiracy case since June 21, 2022 after taking it up on a suo motu basis. The case pertains to the conspiracy hatched by Pakistan-based terrorist organisations to "unleash violent terrorist attacks in J-K with sticky bombs, IEDs and small arms, etc" to carry out terrorist attacks and violence in the Union Territory.

"It involves radicalisation of local youth and mobilisation of overground workers of newly floated terrorist groups such as - The Resistance Front (TRF), United Liberation Front Jammu & Kashmir (ULFJ&K), Mujahideen Gazwat-ul-Hind (MGH), Jammu & Kashmir Freedom Fighters (JKFF), Kashmir Tigers, PAAF and others. "These outfits are affiliated to proscribed terrorist outfits like Laskhar-e-Toiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), Al-Badr, Al-Qaeda, etc," the agency has alleged.