Pathankot terror attack: NIA gathers proof against mastermind Maulana Masood Azhar, Abdul Rauf
Before launching the fidayeen attack, terrorists spoke to Kashif Jan, their handler in Pakistan and Maulana's pointsman for the Pathankot attack.
Four months after 6 Jaish-e-Mohmmad (JeM) terrorist stormed Pathankot Airbase, the national investigating agency (NIA) has gathered technical proof against mastermind Maulana Masood Azhar and his brother Abdul Rauf. A crucial part in unravelling of the Pathankot conspiracy is joining the dots by phone calls and establishing the web link.
Before launching the fidayeen attack, terrorists spoke to Kashif Jan, their handler in Pakistan. Kashif Jan was Maulana's pointsman for the Pathankot attack. Terrorist on entering the Indian side, made an outgoing call to the number of Al Rahmat Trust 923213132786 on December 31, 2015. The Al Tahmat Trust is pseudo face of JeM, and the trusts page is linked to rangonoor.com. The agency has been further able to establish key link of administrator of alqalamonline.com and rangonoor.com as Muhammed Tariq Siddiqui, an important player in JeM. Both dot coms have a common email address an6415@yahoo.com, with its address in Karachi, Pakistan. NIA says that at least two numbers based in Pakistan was called by the terrorist at least 24 times. Most of the intercepts are already available with the agency.
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An expert team also accessed facebook friends of "Kashif Jan" and as per his friend list, most lead to links to Jihad, JeM and contained videos and photos of killed JeM terrorist.
Facebook group also had videos and audio of Maulana Masood Azhar. How terrorist tracked the attack, was also by video channel footage links saved to their site.
While NIA is looking for forensic help from FBI on the Chinese wireless set which was recovered after the attack. The set was with NTRO but after Indian agencies failed to recover the deleted data. After three months, the set was sent to FBI which is expected to share results of the analysis sometime in mid June.
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