Pakistan-based terror group LeT behind Reasi terror attack
On Sunday evening, LeT’s front TRF took credit for the dastardly attack to show that the terror attack was done by homegrown terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir.
New Delhi: Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) is behind the Reasi terror attack in Jammu on Sunday evening in which nine Hindu pilgrims enroute to Vaishno Devi were killed and another 33 injured after jihadists opened fire on the bus as a result of which the vehicle fell into a gorge.
Children injured in the Reasi terror attack.
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On Sunday evening, LeT’s front TRF took credit for the dastardly attack to show that the terror attack was done by homegrown terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir and not foreign Islamists based in Lahore.
According to top official sources, the attack was carried out deliberately during the swearing-in ceremony of Modi 3.0 at Reasi and the perpetrators are around 12 jihadists moving inside the Rajouri-Poonch forests in groups of three or two in the Jammu region. This terrorist group includes a number of Pakistani nationals from across the LoC and there is a possibility of cross-LoC tunnel but this is hotly denied by the Indian security forces and the Indian Army.
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Reasi: The bus after it plunged into a gorge following an ambush by terrorists.
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In the past five years, the Poonch-Rajouri sector has seen a number of fire-fights between the Indian Army and the jihadists and the casualties on the Indian side have been high with terrorists having the advantage of surprise and swifter movement. The Modi government including Home Minister Amit Shah have taken the Reasi attack very seriously as the Amarnath yatra starts from June 29.
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In the past five years, the Poonch-Rajouri sector has seen a number of fire-fights between the Indian Army and the jihadists and the casualties on the Indian side have been high with terrorists having the advantage of surprise and swifter movement. The Modi government including Home Minister Amit Shah have taken the Reasi attack very seriously as the Amarnath yatra starts from June 29.
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Despite PM Modi himself conveying to the Indian Army to pull up their socks in Rajouri-Poonch sector, the results of counter-insurgency operations have been far and few due to hardy and forest terrain in the sector. In the past there have been reports of lack of synergy between the security forces in the 16 Corps sector, which apparently is being addressed by the new Northern Army Commander M V Suchindra Kumar.
While Bharat will retaliate to the Reasi attack in its own and befitting way, the Jammu and Kashmir Police, the para-military forces and the Indian Army must work as a hunt pack with actionable intelligence so as to neutralize this Pakistani group. India cannot afford to have either civilian or military casualties despite significant deployment in the Jammu sector.
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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