Militant Leader Who Organized Attacks in Kashmir Valley Is Killed

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/world/asia/abdul-rehman-abu-qasim-lashkar-e-taiba-killed.html

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NEW DELHI — A high-ranking militant who had organized a number of attacks in the Kashmir Valley was killed on Thursday in a gun battle with security forces, an Indian police official said.

The militant, Abdul Rehman, also known as Abu Qasim, was the leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba, based in Pakistan, for Indian-administered Kashmir, according to S. J. M. Gillani, the police inspector general for the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

“He was the most important terrorist operating in the Kashmir Valley,” Mr. Gillani said by telephone from Srinagar, the state’s summer capital.

Mr. Rehman was killed in a village south of Srinagar after security forces received information indicating that he was there and began conducting a search, a police statement said. On Thursday morning, Mr. Gillani said, militants began firing on the security forces, the police returned fire, and Mr. Rehman was killed.

The police statement, which did not report any other casualties, said that an accomplice of Mr. Rehman had escaped.

The police said Mr. Rehman, a native of Pakistan, had organized attacks on Indian security forces in the Kashmir Valley for five years, including an assault on a bus full of border security officers in August that left two people dead. In 2013, he was involved in an attack on an army bus on the outskirts of Srinagar that killed eight soldiers, according to the police.

India has accused Lashkar-e-Taiba, the network to which Mr. Rehman was said to have belonged, of carrying out the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November 2008 that killed more than 160 people. Mr. Gillani called Mr. Rehman’s killing a “major setback” for the organization in Kashmir.

Though violence has ebbed in the Kashmir Valley since the height of its homegrown militancy in the 1990s, attacks there continue, which India attributes largely to Pakistan-based terrorist groups. Eighteen militants have been killed in the region in the past two months, the Indian Army said on Thursday.

India and Pakistan have accused each other of cease-fire violations in the region and of fomenting attacks in each other’s territories. Diplomatic talks over Kashmir have been suspended twice in the past 15 months.