Punjab Police on Thursday foiled a major attempt to smuggle weapons into the Valley for carrying out terror attacks, with the arrest of two Jammu and Kashmir-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) operatives.
Meanwhile, 10 hand grenades, along with one AK-47 rifle with 2 magazines and 60 live cartridges, have been seized from the suspected militants. They have been identified as Aamir Hussain Wani (26) and Wasim Hassan Wani (27), both residents of Shopian district.
Both of them are actively involved in transporting automatic weapons and hand grenades from Punjab to the Kashmir Valley. They were nabbed by the Pathankot police, who intercepted a truck at a Naka on the Amritsar-Jammu highway in the PS Sadar area.
DGP Dinkar Gupta said that a search of the truck led to the recovery of the weapons and ammunition. The accused, during the preliminary investigation, revealed that they had been directed to collect this weapons consignment from Punjab by Ishfaq Ahmed Dar alias Bashir Ahmed Khan, a former Jammu and Kashmir constable. Currently, an active militant of LeT in the Kashmir valley, Dar had absconded in 2017.
They further disclosed that they had collected the consignment from two unknown persons this morning at a pre-arranged location on Maqboolpura-Vallah road near the vegetable market in Amritsar. They had then concealed the consignment in the truck, which they had brought ostensibly for the purpose of loading vegetables and fruits from the mandi in Amritsar, according to the DGP.
Aamir Hussain Wani has also revealed that, on his earlier trips to Punjab in his truck, he had collected more than Rs. 20 Lacs of hawala money at the behest of his handlers.