The identity cards recovered from the four terrorists gunned down by Indian Army and JKP’s Special Operations Group on Tuesday morning in Surankote tehsil of Poonch district reveal that all the four jihadis of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) group were Pakistani nationals. The four heavily armed terrorists were killed by Indian forces at village Sindarah in the Rajouri-Poonch sector near the Line of Control.
The four heavily armed terrorists were killed by Indian forces at village Sindarah in the Rajouri-Poonch sector.
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According to documents recovered from the slain jihadis, their identities are Mehmood Ahmed, Abdul Hameed, Mohammed Shareef and the fourth one name is unknown except he belongs to Khurshidabad in Occupied Kashmir, right across the site of the encounter after crossing the LoC.
The four belong to a group of 12 LeT terrorists led by Sajjid Jutt, who operate between Kotli in PoK and Sialkot across the international border. All of them are around 23-25 years of age and are hardened veterans of jihad and may have operated across the Durand Line in Afghanistan as part of Lashkar’s on Pakistan’s western front. The 12 member group has been operating in the Rajouri -Poonch sector for the past 18 months as per intelligence inputs and provide safe cover to jihadists infiltrating and exfiltrating from the south of Pir Panjal as well as South Kashmir areas.
Taking advantage of the thickly forested area in the hinterland of Rajouri-Poonch sector, the LeT has wreaked mayhem and violence in this area at the behest of its political master in Islamabad and have inflicted around 24 civilian and military casualties since 2020. They are responsible for the April 20 and May 5 attack in Poonch sector with the design to derail the May 24 G-20 event on Tourism in Kashmir.
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Taking advantage of the thickly forested area in the hinterland of Rajouri-Poonch sector, the LeT has wreaked mayhem and violence in this area at the behest of its political master in Islamabad and have inflicted around 24 civilian and military casualties since 2020. They are responsible for the April 20 and May 5 attack in Poonch sector with the design to derail the May 24 G-20 event on Tourism in Kashmir.
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The identities of the four killed terrorists clearly indicates that the terror factory in Pakistan is alive and kicking with the sole design to target India in the Kashmir Valley and the Jammu hinterland. It is precisely for this very reason that the Narendra Modi government has ruled out any formal or informal dialogue with Pakistan till the terror factories are shut down in the Islamic Republic.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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Home/India News/Killed Poonch terrorists are Pakistan nationals, waging jihad against India
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