Abdullah Uni, a top Lashkar-e-Tayyaba commander and one of the most-wanted militants in Jammu and Kashmir, was killed in a fire fight with the security forces on Tuesday evening, police officials here claimed.
They said the gunbattle raged in the peripheries of north-western town of Sopore early during the day when the Army troops and members of local police’s counterinsurgency Special Operations Group (SOG) zeroed in on a cluster of houses after learning that one of these was being used by the top militant commander and his close associate Muzaffar Moulvi as a hideout.
“While acting on specific information about the presence of militants in village Bagat Mohalla, Batpora in Sopore, police and 22 Rashtriya Rifles laid siege to the area this (Tuesday) afternoon. The search party was fired upon by the holed up militants which was retaliated, triggering an encounter,” a police spokesperson said. The fate of Uni’s colleague Muzaffar Moulvi is still not known.
The officials further said that Uni, a Pakistani national, had crossed into Jammu and Kashmir in 2002 and was working as Lashkar’s operational commander in the restive state and carried a cash reward of `1 million on his head. The officials termed his killing as “a major success” against the militants particularly the Lashkar. The house where Uni was hiding suffered extensive damage during the fighting.
Ironically, the police had claimed killing Uni twice before; during an encounter in Srinagar in March 2009 and in a similar clash on October 23, 2010 in Sopore itself. Sopore’s SP Mir Imtiyaz Husseain said that the militant who was killed in Tuesday’s gunbattle “is undoubtedly Uni.” Soon after the word about his killing spread, slogan chanting youth took to the streets in several localities of Sopore and clashed with the police, witnesses said.
The police said that Uni was involved in the assassination of Kashmir’s moderate cleric and separatist leader Moulana Showkat Ahmed Shah, the charge already denied by the Lashkar, besides numerous attacks on police and central security forces.