PTI, UNITED NATIONS/NEW DELHI: Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar, designated as a global terrorist by the United Nations, is a blue-eyed boy of Pakistan’s spy agency ISI which masterminded several audacious attacks on India including the 2001 Parliament strike and the recent Pulwama carnage in February that pushed the two countries to the brink of war.
A known fugitive, 50-year-old Azhar, who formed the JeM in 2000, was branded the brain behind various suicide strikes in India and known to have fine tuned terror tactics which included survey of potential targets before carrying out the attack.
Azhar’s terror academy in Balakot faced a blitzkrieg from Indian Air Force jets early hours of February 26 after the Pulwama attack on February 14 in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed.
For two decades after his release in exchange for passengers of a hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1999, Azhar has since been the darling of Pakistan’s external snooping agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
After the release of Azhar by India on December 31, 1999, his newly acquired stature in jehadi circles in Pakistan came in handy for the ISI who convinced clerics at the Binori mosque in Karachi to accept Azhar’s leadership and thus, on January 31, 2000, the JeM was born.
But despite earning a reputation of being a “manufacturer of suicide attackers”, Azhar was not a hard nut to crack when he was in the custody of Indian forces, according to officials.
A former police officer, who interrogated Azhar after his arrest in 1994, said he got shaken up on the first “slap” from an army jawan, prompting him to blurt out details of not only his movements but also of other terror groups operating from Pakistan.
Azhar was arrested in Anantnag in South Kashmir in February 1994 after he had entered into India on a Portuguese passport through Bangladesh. It was a chance arrest. He along with Sajjad Afghani were travelling in an auto when it was stopped by armymen at Khanabal.
“Both ran from the autorickshaw prompting the army men to nab them. Army men were happy to find Sajjad Afghani and had a little knowledge about the other,” former Director General of Sikkim Police Avinash Mohananey, who interrogated Azhar many times during his two-decade tenure in the Intelligence Bureau, told PTI.
The son of a retired school headmaster from Bhawalpur in Pakistan, Azhar always felt his custody in India was going to be short-lived and that attempts would be made for his release.
