Foreign secretary Misri provided TRF dossier to US and UN 1267 Committee
India was informed of the TRF designation as a global terror outfit four days before the formal notification on Thursday.
The global terror tag on the TRF by the Trump administration demonstrates continuing convergence on the counter terrorism agenda between India and the US. Also, this is a message to Pakistan that the Trump administration will give them no quarter on terrorism no matter the much-celebrated lunch between Field Marshal Hafiz Asim Munir and President Donald Trump.
While foreign secretary Vikram Misri handed over the TRF dossier to the US State Department during his visit to Washington on May 27-29, a similar dossier was also handed over to the UN 1267 Committee in New York for special designation of the group.
The TRF, led by Sheikh Sajjad Gul aka Sajjad Ahmed Sheikh, the Kashmiri face of LeT specifically chosen by the ISI, has been involved in a series of terror attacks, including targeted killings, in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 in central and south Kashmir. It has staged grenade attacks in Central Kashmir (2023), an ambush on JKP in Bijbehara area of Anantnag in 2023, Gagangir, Z-Morh tunnel attack and Ganderbal attack in 2024, apart from the Pahalgam massacre.
Sajjad Gul is currently based in Rawalpindi and is involved in radicalisation, recruitment, planning and execution of terror attacks in J&K.
His brother Parvez Ahmed Sheikh (an ex-doctor in SMHS Hospital, Srinagar) was a terrorist in the Kashmir Valley in the 1990s. Parvez went to Saudi Arabia with his family and then moved to Pakistan. He is involved in terror funding and hawala activities with Indian fugitives based in the Gulf Countries.
Sajjad Gul, 50, who was designated as a terrorist under UAPA in 2022, belongs to the HMT area of Srinagar. He completed his basic education in Srinagar and then pursued an MBA in Bengaluru. He then pursued a laboratory technician course in Kerala and returned to Srinagar to set up a diagnostic lab and at the same time started providing support to LeT.
He was arrested by the Special Cell of Delhi Police from Nizamuddin Railway Station, and five kilograms of RDX were recovered from him. He was involved in reconnaissance of targets and conspiring to engineer bomb blasts in Delhi. Gul and his two associates were sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment on August 7, 2003.
Following the completion of his sentence and release from prison, Sajjad escaped to Pakistan in 2017 along with his family. It was the ISI that chose Sajjad as head of TRF in 2019 to front-end for LeT and project that terrorism was home-bred in Jammu and Kashmir. The ISI strategised the move in the aftermath of the Pulwama bombing in February 2019, when Pakistan came under adverse notice of the world for sponsoring and harbouring terrorists and terror groups. While TRF is designed to project that terror in Kashmir is an indigenous movement, the fact is that it is a demon child of ISI-LeT.
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