India’s Operation Sindoor airstrikes have reportedly eliminated an operational chief of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) who was involved in the kidnapping and murder of the Jewish-American journalist Daniel Pearl.
Indian forces carried what they said was a precision operation strike against nine terrorist locations across Pakistan and Kashmir.
They were launched in response to a terror attack in the Kashmiri town of Pahalgam, which saw 26 civilians, mostly Hindu tourists, on April 22.
The Indian government has blamed the attack on Pakistan-based terror groups.
It is now reported that the strikes killed Abdul Rauf Azhar, operational chief of JeM and a central conspirator in Pearl’s 2002 kidnapping and murder.
The younger brother of JeM founder Masood Azhar, he was the mastermind behind a hijacking which resulted in the release of Al-Qaeda operative Omar Saeed Sheikh.
Sheikh would later go on to abduct and behead Pearl, a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, in a brutal execution that shocked the world.
The Bahawalpur strike, which targeted JeM’s Markaz Subhan Allah complex, reportedly killed Azhar and 10 members of Masood Azhar’s family, including his sister and brother-in-law.
In a social media post following the latest phase of the operation, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – the governing party of India – announced that Azhar had been among those killed in the Pakistani city of Bahawalpur,
Pearl had been the local bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal and was abducted after travelling to Karachi for an interview with Mubarak Al Gilani, a religious leader who had been accused of running a terrorist training camp attended by British failed terrorist Richard Reid.
