All evidence in Uri attack points to Lashkar hand

NEW DELHI: As posters emerged in Pakistan's Gujranwala town announcing that Lashkar-e-Taiba would hold funeral prayers in absentia for Muhammad Anas, one of the four slain terrorists involved in last month's Uri attack, top officers in the Indian security establishment said the LeT owning up the attacker as its “lion-hearted warrior“ may well be true.

Though the director general of military operations had held terror group Jaishe-Mohammed responsible for the September 18 strike hours after the encounter, the claim was based on intercepts of a conversation taped between a Jaish commander and a Kashmiri scribe on the day of the attack.

The National Investigation Agency's examination of recoveries made from the slain terrorists, however, seemed to contradict the theory of attributing the Uri mission to Jaish. An officer in the security establishment told TOI that the codes mentioned on the matrix sheets recovered from the fidayeen were those used by LeT.

The LeT angle also conformed to inputs shared with the Army just three days before the attack, warning about the presence of eight Lashkar terrorists across the LoC in POK since August 28, waiting to infiltrate into Uri with the specific aim of hitting the Army base. A senior J&K police of ficer said that Uri was essentially an “LeT-dominated“ area, with limited presence and operations by Jaish.

Though NIA officers had, while taking over the Uri probe, said the question of affiliation of the attackers would be settled during investigation, the agency was quick to blame Jaish for the strike following the arrest of two guides who it said had helped the fidayeen infiltrate and reach the camp.

NIA even identified the two men as Jaish cadres, though guides are not really known to affiliate themselves with any terror group.

Incidentally , NIA sources told TOI that the two guides have since been changing their versions, making it difficult for the sleuths to piece together specifics of the attack. Home ministry officers, when asked about the LeT posters communicating its plans to offer `namaz-egayabana' for Anas, said it was commonplace for Pakistan-based terror outfits to offer such prayers for terrorists killed in J&K.