Pakistan-based Kashmiri militant commander Syed Salahuddin has reportedly claimed that armed guerrillas of his organisation, Hizbul Mujahideen, had killed five Indian soldiers on the Line of Control in the Poonch sector on August 6.
A local news agency, Kashmir News Service, reported that Hizb’s “Supreme Commander” and Chairman of the United Jihad Council Salahuddin had claimed to it in a telephonic interview on Friday that it was the militants of his outfit, not the Pakistani troops, who had killed the five Indian soldiers in an ambush near Chakan Da Bagh earlier this month.
“If India is blaming the Pakistani Army for the killing of the five soldiers in the Poonch sector, let me make it clear to them that Hizbul Mujahideen’s Sarhad Squad killed those soldiers under a particular strategy. Militants have, in fact, shifted their operations and intensified attacks on the Indian troops along the LoC after the Kashmiris’ peaceful agitation in 2008,” Salahuddin is reported to have said. According to him, neither India nor Pakistan could stop the militants from crossing the LoC.
Salahuddin has, according to the report, said violations of ceasefire between India and Pakistan had remained unabated ever since it was announced on November 26, 2003. “In 2011, ceasefire was violated 62 times, in 2012 as many as 117 times and this year, till date, 82 times. Infiltration of militants and the ceasefire violations would continue until the resolution of the Kashmir dispute,” Salahuddin reportedly said.
