Home Ministry has given sanction to NIA to file a charge sheet against Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Masood Azhar and three others in the Pathankot terror strike carried out on 2 January.
After receiving sanction under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), the NIA will name Azhar, his brother Rauf Asghar, and handlers of four terrorists – Qashif Jan and Shaid Latif – in the charge sheet to be filed soon, official sources said.
The four terrorists, after entering India through the Bamiyal area of Gurudaspur, had carried out the strike inside the strategic Pathankot Indian Air Force base, killing eight people – including seven personnel of IAF and NSG.
Six protected persons, a jailed terrorist and officials of Federal Bureau of Investigation and US Department of Justice figure as witnesses in the charge sheet filed.
NIA has submitted statement of six witnesses in a sealed cover before the court and prayed before the court that the names of these people should be kept secret under section 44(3) of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Section 17 of National Investigation Agency Act (Protection of witnesses).
The list of witnesses also names a Special Agent of FBI and an official of US Department of Justice who had executed the Indian request sent under Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty for getting the details from Facebook and other websites on which Jaish had uploaded an audio file claiming responsibility for the attack.
The fresh charge sheet will help India in building pressure on the international community to declare Azhar and his organisation a global terror group under the United Nations' anti-terror laws. The previous attempts were spurned after China exercised its veto power.
The charge sheet will name only four terrorists involved in the attack as against six claimed by the NSG.
According to the NIA, the terrorists, who were killed after two days of gunfight, were identified as Nasir Hussain, Hafiz Abu Bakar, Umar Farooq and Abdul Qayum. They were residents of Vehari (Punjab), Gujranwala (Punjab), Sanghar (Sindh) and Sukkur (Sindh) districts of Pakistan respectively.
The NIA's probe will also include looking into the phone numbers and a conversation that one of the terrorists had minutes before launching the attack – besides a video message of Rauf released on a Jaish-affiliated website minutes after the strike.
In the video message, which was subsequently removed from the website, Rauf had claimed responsibility for the Pathankot attack.
The charge sheet will also include evidence of linking the footprints of one of the terrorists obtained from Bamiyal, besides matching of DNA sample obtained from a soft drink can in the hijacked car of Punjab Superintendent of Police Salwinder Singh.
The Pathankot terror strike had seen a joint investigation team from Pakistan also arriving in India to carry out a thorough probe.
However, upon their return, the Pakistani team had claimed that India had neither shared much evidence nor allowed it to interrogate the personnel involved in repulsing the attack.
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