Police say the Lashkar took help from the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA), another jihadi group which had already established itself in Kashmir, to enter Srinagar. In April, 1999, the J&K police arrested 22 Lashkar men from Srinagar. The police say Lashkar’s first local militant Altaf Bhat was arrested in Srinagar on January 1, 1999 while its first Pakistani militant Abdul Khaliq alias Abu Hamza was killed in an encounter at Treesu, Ganderbal. The Kargil war of 1999 shifted the entire focus of the police and security agencies away from the Lashkar.

Striking after Kargil

And as soon as the Kargil war ended, Lashkar introduced its suicide attacks with a sneak-in strike at the BSF camp in Bandipore on July 13, 1999. Lashkar had publicly claimed the involvement of its cadres in the Kargil incursions and later termed the Bandipore fidayeen attack as its expression of “displeasure over Pakistan’s withdrawal from Kargil under United States pressure”. On November 3, Lashkar targeted the Army’s 15 Corps headquarters and killed Defence PRO Major Purshottam.

The attack put the Lashkar under serious scrutiny. The J&K Police claim that Ishfaq alias Abu Mavia of Pakistan, the first-ever operations chief of the Lashkar in the Valley and responsible for the Bandipore attack, was killed on December 28, 1999, on the outskirts of Srinagar.

The Chittisingpora massacre

In March 2000, the J&K Police accused the Lashkar of carrying out the Chittisingpora massacre, in which 36 members of the Sikh community were lined up and killed in a nocturnal raid. The massacre had coincided with the visit of the then US president Bill Clinton to New Delhi. Five days after the massacre, the police and army picked up villagers, dubbed them as Lashkar militants responsible for the Chittisinghpora massacres and killed them in a fake encounter. The fake encounter was exposed, thus putting a question mark on the identity of the perpetrators of Chittisinghpora massacre.

... contd.