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Pak JeM Masood Azhar kin and Kashmir chief killed in Tral

The Victor Force of the Indian Army, which was acting on an intelligence tip-off, reached the terrorist hideout in three days and then neutralised the Pakistani national.

Updated on: Jul 31, 2021, 15:16:59 IST
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A top Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist, operating in the Kashmir Valley since 2018, was killed during a very close coordinated operation by the Victor Force of the Indian Army headed by General Rashim Bali, Jammu and Kashmir police and intelligence on Saturday.

Ismail Alvi, centre, a relative of Masood Azhar and a resident of Bahawalpur in Pakistan, is seen in this photo. (Jammu and Kashmir Police)
Ismail Alvi, centre, a relative of Masood Azhar and a resident of Bahawalpur in Pakistan, is seen in this photo. (Jammu and Kashmir Police)

Mohammad Ismail Alvi, also known as Ibrahim, Lamba, Lala, Lambu and Adnan, was the bodyguard of Mufti Abdul Rauf Asghar, the de-facto chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed with Masood Azhar Alvi bed-ridden in Pakistan's Bahawalpur. According to intelligence inputs, Ismail entered the valley through the Shakargarh sector in the first week of May 2018 and was involved in a series of terror attacks since then. He also recruited several local men to the JeM fold in the valley.

Before infiltrating into India, he visited the JeM training centre at Jaba-Balakot, Manshera in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, apart from JeM Markaz at Bahawalpur in Pakistan. An expert on vehicle-borne IEDs, which are routinely used in Afghanistan and was also used in the Pulwama attack, Ismail trained with the Taliban, according to senior officials.

His contacts also included Talha Saif, the brother of Mufti Abdul Rauf Asghar, Hafeez Al Rehman the facilitator of the Pulwama attack, the son of Ibrahim Azhar Mohd Umar and other JeM commanders like Qari Zarrar, Shahid Lateef, Gazi Khan, Hammad and others.

He was instrumental in training Adil Ahmed Dar, who carried out the suicide attack in Pulwama, which killed 40 security force personnel. He also trained Sameer Dar, the local JeM cadre and the cousin of Pulwama attacker Adil Ahmed Dar, in fabrication and handling shaped vehicle-borne IEDs.

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta

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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