How a Kashmir probe into Jaish posters nearly unmasked Delhi blast plot

On the evening of October 17, Nisar Ahmad Dar, a resident of Nowgam on the outskirts of Srinagar, received a call from the local police station.

The official on the other end of the line told Dar to bring his elder son Arif Nisar Dar, 22, to the police station the next day.

A day before, posters bearing the name of the Pakistan-based militant outfit, Jaish-e-Muhammad, had appeared on some shopfronts in the Nowgam locality of Bunpora.

According to the police, the posters carried “threatening” and “intimidating” messages against the police and security forces. “I handed over my son to the police at Nowgam police station on Saturday, ” October 18, said Nisar Dar, a labour contractor.

Two other young men from Bunpora – 19-year-old Yasir-ul-Ashraf and 25-year-old Maqsood Ahmad Dar – had also been summoned by the police.

Ashraf, who studied till Class 12, ran a copper utensils shop owned by his father near Nowgam police station. Maqsood Dar has a Master’s degree in commerce and worked as an accountant at an iron-and-steel shop in Nowgam.

While Nisar Dar said his son knew both, Yasir and Maqsood’s families denied that they were friends with Arif Dar.

Maqsood Dar’s father Ghulam Mohammad Dar told Scroll that “when someone told him that the police were looking for him, he went on his own to the police station”.

By November 10, the police surmised that the three men seem to have been involved in a much larger conspiracy.

According to the Jammu and Kashmir police, its investigations into the sudden appearance of Jaish-e-Muhammad posters case led to the unmasking of “an inter-state and transnational terror module”, linked with Jaish-e-Mohammad and Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind.

Jaish-e-Mohammad, headed by the globally designated terrorist Masood Azhar, has a history of carrying out terrorist attacks in India, including the 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing. Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind was formed in Kashmir in 2017.

The Jammu and Kashmir police investigations led to the arrest of seven Kashmiris from various parts of the country, including two doctors, and the recovery of a massive amount of arms, ammunition and explosives.

But the uncovering of a terror cell was not enough to avert tragedy. On the evening of November 10, a car exploded near the crowded Red Fort market in the capital city of Delhi. The blast has left 13 dead. The man driving the car was a Kashmiri doctor – Umer Nabi from South Kashmir’s Pulwama district.

Investigating agencies have suggested that Nabi was also part of the same terror module, but there has been no official statement on that count.

The Jammu and Kashmir police probe also led to other alleged actors in the plot – a cleric from Shopian who is claimed to have asked the young men to paste the posters and a 29-year-old from Ganderbal district.

The three young men

A few days after he accompanied his son to the police station, Nisar Dar went back to check on him.

That day, his son made a confession in the presence of his father and senior police officials. “My son said he has committed a mistake by pasting the posters and promised that he would not repeat it in the future,” said Nisar Dar.

He added: “I told the police to be careful with him as he gets very aggressive and has suicidal tendencies.”

Arif Dar has a history of serious mental health ailments and has been on antidepressants for many years, his father said. Scroll has seen his health records and they confirm the claim.

The father of Maqsood Dar told Scroll that his son, too, had admitted to his mistake. “My son is a helpful sort,” said Ghulam Mohammad Dar, a farmer. “He would help people apply for a ration card, or an Aadhaar or a domicile certificate.”

Ghulam Dar said he asked his son about the posters while in the police station. “He said that some boys had approached him a few days back and asked him to get some posters in Urdu printed,” Dar said. “Since my son did not know how to read Urdu, he had printed them.”

According to police officials, their investigations eventually showed that the cleric in Shopian district had tasked the three young men with putting up the posters.

The three are under arrest.

A raid in Shopian

After the questioning of the three Nowgam youth on October 18, police teams raided South Kashmir’s Nadigam village in Shopian district the same night.

The target of the raid was the home of a 24-year-old cleric, Mufti Irfan Ahmad Wagay, who taught at an academy where Arif Dar had been a student.

“Around 11 in the night, there was a knock on our door,” recalled Fatima Bano, Wagay’s wife and the mother of a two-year-old. “The police had brought a local boy with them to show the way to our house.”

Bano, who is five months pregnant, said the police officials asked for her husband and took him along. “They also seized his laptop and mobile phone,” she said. “They also took the keys of his living quarters in Nowgam.”

A preacher and a Quran tutor, Wagay had been working in Srinagar’s Nowgam area for the last five to six years. He would visit his home in Shopian every Saturday and return to Nowgam on Monday.

“That day, a Saturday, he had come home a few hours ago,” Fatima Bano explained.

In Kashmir, it is common for clerics and preachers from far-flung rural areas to take up the job of leading prayers and teaching the Quran in urban neighbourhoods. In many cases, the mosques also provide living quarters for the cleric and his family – as a mosque in Nowgam had given Wagay.

“We had employed him around the outbreak of Covid-19,” recalled Farooq Ahmad, president of the mosque committee in Nowgam’s Nayak Bagh locality. “Had we seen anything wrong with him, we would have fired him on that very day. We are as shocked as anyone by the revelations made by the police.”

Wagay was paid a salary of Rs 16,000 per month.

He mostly lived alone in Nowgam. "I used to go there only during Ramzan and some winter months,” said Fatima Bano. “The rest of the time, he was living alone.”

His family finds it hard to believe that Wagay was involved in militancy.

“He was someone who would shudder at the sight of an Army personnel,” Bano said. “How could he be part of all this? Had I known that my husband was involved in something like that, would I have agreed to have two kids?”

Wagay had dropped out of formal schooling after Class 3 and was admitted to a religious seminary in Srinagar’s Lal Bazar area.

In 2017-’18, he went to Deoband in Uttar Pradesh for further religious studies that would qualify him to become a mufti. One of seven siblings, Wagay soon took on the responsibility for providing for his family.

“Our father rears sheep and does some farming while my brothers do daily labour,” said Rubi Jan, Wagay’s sister.

While Wagay’s family said the police had taken the keys of his Nowgam quarters on the day of his arrest on October 18, local residents in Nayak Bagh said the police searched his quarters in the presence of a magistrate 18 days after his arrest.

“During their search, they checked his book rack,” said Ahmad, from the mosque committee. “When they started looking between the stacked books, they found photocopies of three posters. The police said they are the same posters that had appeared in Bunpora in Nowgam in October.”

According to his family, Wagay would also teach the Quran and Arabic at other places and even online to make extra money.

One of the religious academies Wagay taught was in Bunpora, Nowgam. “My son would study in the same academy,” said Nisar Ahmad Dar, father of Arif Nisar Dar. “However, he had stopped going there for the last three months.”

The families of the other two young men – Yasir Ashraf and Maqsood Dar – said their sons had no links with the cleric. “My son is not religious,” said Mohd Ashraf, Yasir’s father. “He does not even pray regularly. How would he get attracted to study the Quran at an academy?”

Police officials in Srinagar said Wagay was the one who had tasked the three youngsters with putting up Jaish posters. “His role is turning out to be that of the recruiter in the module,” said a police official, declining to be identified.

It is not clear, however, how much the three men and Wagay knew about the larger conspiracy of carrying out terror attacks in mainland India.

The arrest in Ganderbal

A week after the first spree of arrests, the police picked up a 29-year-old Zameer Ahmad Ahanger from Wakoora village of Central Kashmir’s Ganderbal district.

Another police officer, who also declined to be identified, said Ahanger was in touch with the Shopian cleric, who had recruited him to the terror module.

During the investigation, Ahanger revealed that he had a pistol in his possession, the police officer said. The firearm was eventually recovered in a separate raid.

“There is no previous case against him but he had been summoned by the police way back in 2019 for misuse of social media and was let go after counselling,” the officer added.

After dropping out of Class 12, Ahanger shifted his focus to religious education and studied at a seminary in Srinagar’s Noor Bagh locality for four years. He then developed an interest in the Tablighi Jamaat, a Sunni Muslim proselytising organisation that urges Muslims to follow their faith with greater rigour.

Ahanger’s health made him unable to hold a job. “He was unable to work because of a chronic migraine issue,” said his father, Mohd Ismail Ahanger. “He has been on painkillers since he was 16.”

Ahanger had worked as a religious teacher for a year and a half at a local educational institute in Ganderbal some years ago, his father said. “Since he had serious health issues and would collapse as a result of severe headaches, we asked him to stay home,” said Mohd Ismail.

The youngest of three siblings, Ahanger has a sister and an elder brother who works as a lecturer in Saudi Arabia.

Ahanger’s family denies his involvement in any Jaish terror module. “He did not have any friends nor would he go anywhere,” said Mohd Ismail. “He was mostly home.”

However, one thing his family members are not sure about is his mobile phone activity. “We guarantee that as far as his physical presence and activities are concerned, there is nothing wrong,” said Mohd Ismail, who makes ends meet by farming and doing embroidery work. “But when it comes to a mobile phone, how can we know how he was using it? We are illiterate people.”

Ismail said they have been allowed to meet their son only once since his arrest last month. “We could not talk much because he was surrounded by cops,” he said. “But throughout our five-minute-long-conversation, he kept crying. All he was saying was that ‘I have been falsely implicated.’”

Doctors in net

Five days after Ahanger’s arrest, the Jammu and Kashmir police extended its investigations to the Al-Falah School of Medical Sciences and Research Centre in Faridabad, Haryana.

On October 30, Dr Muzamil Ahmad Ganie, who was a tutor in the department of physiology at Al-Falah, was arrested in a joint operation of the Jammu and Kashmir police and the Haryana police.

Wagay’s first contact with Ganie was in 2021, said the first police officer. “In 2021, he had gone to pay a visit to an ailing religious scholar from Tral at Soura hospital in Srinagar,” he said. “The two met there for the first time.”

The police investigation led them to Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, from where Dr Adeel Ahmad Rather was arrested.

A resident of South Kashmir’s Kulgam district, Rather was the son of a retired tehsildar. He graduated in medicine from Srinagar’s Government Medical College and was working as a specialist at a private hospital in Saharanpur. Before that, he had been employed as a senior resident in the Government Medical College in Anantnag.

After his arrest, the police recovered an automatic rifle from his locker in the Anantnag college.

The missing link in the module was Dr Umer Nabi, who allegedly detonated the explosives in the car.

Nabi is from Koil village, like Ganie. “Not only did they come from the same village but they were also in touch with each other since 2018,” said the second police officer. “They worked at the same Faridabad hospital.”

According to the officer, Nabi went into hiding when he came to know about Ganie’s arrest. “On October 31, Nabi’s sister-in-law contacted him,” the officer said. “He asked her not to disturb him for some days as he was busy with exams. His brother had also talked to him and asked him to send some money for household expenditure. Umer transferred Rs 40,000 immediately to his brother.”

The last communication between Nabi and his family took place on November 7, when he spoke to his brother briefly, the officer added. “This was when he was in hiding,” he added.

Nabi’s two brothers, sister and brother-in-law have been detained and are being questioned.

Three days after his last conversation with his brother, Umer Nabi blew himself up.