LeT gave rifle to Pak man killed with Ishrat

An AK-56 automatic rifle planted on Amjad Ali, one of the two Pakistani deceased in the Ishrat Jahan encounter, was allegedly provided to him before the incident for use in a terror operation by a late Indian LeT operative, Salim Salar.

An AK-56 automatic rifle planted on Amjad Ali, one of the two Pakistani deceased in the Ishrat Jahan encounter, was allegedly provided to him before the incident for use in a terror operation by a late Indian Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative, Salim Salar.

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Salar, who hailed from Madhya Pradesh, was killed in a police encounter in Lucknow on March 7, 2006. He handed over the rifle at a site in Ahmedabad to Ali and another deceased Jishan Johar, who were allegedly Pakistani LeT operatives, according to the FIR lodged by Ahmedabad crime branch (CB) after the encounter on June 15, 2004, according to a home ministry source.

The encounter was found to be “fake” in a probe by the CBI, whose July charge sheet named seven CB officials as accused and said that the four deceased, including Ali and Johar, were killed in cold blood.

“Salar had handed over the AK-56 in the presence of two local LeT sleeper-cell operatives who were tasked by its Pakistani handlers to assist Ali and Johar. The two LeT operatives, identified as C1 and C2 in the CBI’s charge sheet, were actually passive agents of the Ahmedabad crime branch,” said the source.

According to the charge sheet, three weapons including an AK-56 and two 9 mm pistols were allegedly planted on the deceased after the fake encounter by the accused policemen.