Pulwama terror attacker, a school dropout, went missing last yr

Srinagar: Adil Ahmed Dar alias ‘Waqas commando’ who carried out the deadly suicide attack in which 49 CRPF jawans were killed near here on Thursday was a school dropout and was until a few months ago working as a sawmill worker.

However, his father Ghulam Hassan Dar, who runs a small shop in Kakapora area of Jammu and Kashmir’s southern Pulwama district said that Adil was preparing to appear in the 12th Class examination when he went missing suddenly last year.

The Senior Dar had filed a police complaint after his son went missing. The family’s search ended after 22-year-old Adil’s photograph circulated by Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM)through social media on Thursday, showing him holding an AK-47 rifle and with ‘Waqas Commando’ as his ‘code name’ written on it.

Earlier during that day, Adil had detonated a sedan laden with, at least, sixty kilograms of deadly RDX after driving it parallel to a fully occupied bus which was part of a large CRPF convoy at Lethapora along the Srinagar-Jammu highway and barely ten kilometres from Gundi Bagh where the Dars live.

The explosives blew up in a 150-metre radius and the CRPF bus was blasted open and reduced to ribbons of charred metal and the human remains scattered across a 100 metre stretch of the road. Several other vehicles and nearby shops and buildings also suffered damage in the impact of the massive blast.

The preliminary investigations into the deadliest ever attack since the eruption of insurgency in J&K nearly three decades ago have revealed that Adil did not ram the explosive-laden vehicle into the CRPF bus as was reported earlier but detonated the explosives right next to it, after overtaking the convoy of 78 vehicles buses from the left. The police and other investigating agencies are now trying to ascertain whose sedan it was, how Adil managed to get hold of the RDX and who helped him in planting it in the vehicle. Apparently, he had been trained by the JeM for the sensational act, the officials said.

The police sources here said that Adil had joined the JeM only last year. However, he had been on the police’s radar for his involvement in stone-pelting incidents and was acting as an ‘overground worker’ of the militants in his area. After his joining the militant outfit formally, he was categorized as ‘C’ grade militant by the local police.

Adil’s family has said that he was shot in the leg by the security forces during unrest triggered by the killing of popular Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in July 2016.

His father claimed that he knew Adil was a “disgruntled” youth but had no clue about his terror activities.  He said Adil told the family last year that he was preparing to appear in the 12th class examination and in this connection had to go to Jammu for a few days. “It was the last time that we saw him” he said.