Riyaz Naikoo, top Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist, killed in Pulwama encounter
The operation to nab Riyaz Naikoo was launched in his native Beigpora Gulazapura in Awantipora by the joint team of Jammu and Kashmir police and security forces on Tuesday night.
Top Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Riyaz Naikoo has been killed along with two associates by a joint team of security forces in Kashmir’s Pulwama district, a senior security official said on Wednesday.
Riyaz Naikoo, who was leading the banned Hizbul Mujahideen in Kashmir valley, had been trapped in Beighbora village in Pulwama. ((Photo: Twitter/@IjoydeepRoy))
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Riyaz Naikoo, who was leading the banned Hizbul Mujahideen in Kashmir valley, had been trapped in the operation in Beighbora village of Pulwama district earlier in the day. Jammu and Kashmir director general of police Dilbag Singh was supervising the operation.
A senior police officer described Riyaz Naikoo’s elimination as a huge success.
Naikoo is learnt to be close to the Pakistan-based Hizbul chief, Syed Salahuddin, who was declared a global terrorist by the US in 2017.
Naikoo had taken over as chief of the terror group after the outfit’s Kashmir commander Burhan Wani was gunned down in July 2016.
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The tech-savvy Naikoo, who used to give private tuitions to school children before joining Hizbul Mujahideen, had played a crucial role in holding the terror group’s hold in the valley after the group’s Zakir Musa split the outfit in 2017 to form his own group Ansar Ghazwatul Hind.
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The tech-savvy Naikoo, who used to give private tuitions to school children before joining Hizbul Mujahideen, had played a crucial role in holding the terror group’s hold in the valley after the group’s Zakir Musa split the outfit in 2017 to form his own group Ansar Ghazwatul Hind.
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Zakir Musa’s new outfit was claimed to be an affiliate of Al Qaeda. Musa didn’t get to lead the new outfit for long. He was killed in an encounter in Tral in May last year.
Naikoo, however, had been awfully lucky. In Kashmir, where the career span of terrorists rarely exceeds four years, Naikoo lasted eight years.
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He had been cornered by the security forces in Kashmir on several occasions but had managed to slip out every time. One reason, a J&K police officer told Hindustan Times, that when the police got the initial input about the presence of Kashmir’s most-wanted terrorist, police chief Dilbag Singh quickly got into the picture to oversee the entire operation.
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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