- Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Three motorcycle-borne men fired indiscriminately killing 53-year-old Latif and his brother identified as Haris Hashim on the spot, officials said.
By: Shubham Ghosh
AT a time when India and Canada have locked horns over the killing of a Sikh separatist leader, designated a terrorist by New Delhi, on Canadian soil in June, another anti-India mastermind was reportedly assassinated, this time in Pakistan.
Just as Hardeep Singh Nijjar was gunned down by unidentified assailants outside a gurdwara in Surrey in British Columbia, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) leader Shahid Latif, who was instrumental behind the terror attack on the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot in the northern Indian state of Punjab in January 2016, was shot by unknown assassins outside a mosque in Daska town in Sialkot district of Pakistan’s Punjab province on Wednesday (11), officials said.
The officials in the know of the development said that the incident happened outside the Noor Madina mosque in the early hours of Wednesday when Latif was coming out after prayers.
Three motorcycle-borne men fired indiscriminately, killing 53-year-old Latif and his brother identified as Haris Hashim on the spot and injuring another, they said.
Latif alias Bilal alias Noor Al Din, a designated terrorist under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, was the launching commander of the Jaish-e-Mohammed in Sialkot and had been involved in planning, facilitation and execution of terror attacks in India.
The officials said that Latif had entered Kashmir in 1993 from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as a cadre of a banned terror group. However, he was arrested a year later and sent to the Kot Balwal Jail in Jammu in India.
It is believed that he was brainwashed further by Masood Azhar, who was also lodged in that jail till he was set free in 1999 in exchange for the passengers of IC-814, an Indian Airlines plane that was hijacked by terrorists and taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan.
After spending 16 years in Indian jail, he was deported through the Attari-Wagah border between Pakistan and India in 2010 and is believed to have got in touch again with Azhar, who had by that time formed the JeM terror group.
“This is the biggest blow to JeM on Pakistan soil,” an official said.
Latif, a resident of Aminabad in Punjab’s Gujranwala, was wanted by India’s National Investigation Agency.
Seven Indian Air Force personnel were killed when four JeM terrorists sneaked into the Pathankot Air Force Station on January 2, 2016. The siege went on for three days.
(With PTI inputs)
