THE BOMBMAKER OF PULWAMA

THE SCENE OF THE CARNAGE wreaked by the terror attack in Pulwama on the afternoon of February 14, 2019, was worse than in a horror film. Burnt human body parts and mangled steel lay strewn across the Jammu-Srinagar segment of National Highway No. 44 that cuts through the Pulwama district of south Kashmir. In one of the worst terror strikes in the erstwhile state, 40 CRPF personnel travelling in a convoy were slaughtered when a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into the bus they were in. The Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) immediately claimed responsibility for the strike and released a pre-recorded video of the purported suicide bomber as he announced his motives for the deadly plot. The fidayeen attack pushed India and Pakistan to the brink of war, with the air forces of both countries conducting air strikes on each other’s territory—for the first time since the 1971 war.

Now, 18 months after the attack, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has pieced together the puzzle, including identifying the Pulwama bombmaker, how he planned and executed his deadly assignment and who his masters were. On August 25, the central agency filed a 13,800-page charge-sheet in a special court in Jammu in which it accused 19 individuals, seven of them Pakistani nationals including the JeM top brass, of aiding, abetting and executing the terror attack. However, the NIA’s most striking revelation is the role of the then 22-year-old Pakistani Muhammad Umar Farooq, who led the JeM module that executed the attack. Umar Farooq was an expert bombmaker, and the NIA has evidence to show that a fortnight before the attack, he had assembled the two Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), weighing a total of 200 kilograms, with a potent mix of explosives, including RDX, at a house in Kakapora, Pulwama, not far from the site of the attack.

UMAR FAROOQ’S PARTIALLY DAMAGED PHONE, WHICH HELD THE CLUES TO THE ATTACK, LAY UNDECIPHERED FOR EIGHT MONTHS AFTER BEING SEIZED BY SECURITY FORCES

So meticulously had Umar Farooq planned the Pulwama attack that when the NIA team took over the case a day after the strike, the crime scene did not provide any immediate clues regarding its perpetrators. Umar Farooq was not even in the list of initial suspects. He and another JeM operative were killed 43 days after the Pulwama incident, on March