PAKISTAN BASED TERRORISTS RUNNING SCARED, GO INTO HIDING

Is the Indian government executing Pakistan-based wanted terrorists as part of a secret assassination pro- gram? Who is running this program, when was it started and how many targets are on the hit list?

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

These are the questions that foreign diplomats and for- eign journalists in Delhi are trying to find an answer to, without any success or irrefutable evidence that can tie the killings to India’s premier intelligence agency. However, what The Sunday Guardian can confirm by talk- ing to sources in Pakistan is that the series of killings of Pakistan-based wanted terrorists by unidentified gun- men has led to known ter- rorists and their accomplice going underground for fear of being the next target of these assassins.

While the killing of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar by unidentified gunmen in June in Canada made this entire issue aglobal matter and ensured a diplo- matic dispute between India and Canada, details accessed by The Sunday Guardian reveal that at least 18 such killings have occurred in the last two years in Pakistan, of which 16 have occurred since February this year.

All the 16 who have been killed were either present or former active workers and functionaries of anti-India terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Jaishe-Mohammad and Hizbul Mujahideen and all of them at one point or the other, had contributed by one way or the other to killing Indian citizens in India.

These terrorists have been killed across various parts of Pakistan—Karachi, Sialkot, Neelam valley (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Rawalkot, Rawalpindi and Lahore.

And all of these killings have been carried out mostly by using the same modus operandi—gunmen on motorcycles shooting them from close distance and leaving the spot before anyone can understand what has happened. Everything is over within 10 seconds.
Official sources said that such flawless killing requires trained people with months of mental and physical practices and it will be a shoddy guesswork to attribute it to low level thugs.