Another Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist, and close aide of Masood Azhar, Maulana Raheem Ullah Tariq was shot dead by ‘unknown men’ in the Orangi town area of Karachi, Pakistan, on Monday (13th November).
According to media reports, he was going to attend a religious gathering when unidentified people opened fire at him. Local media outlets from Pakistan, citing police officials, reported that the incident appeared as a case of “targeted killing”.
The media report referred to the wanted terrorist as “Mauzin”, a person who proclaims the call to the daily prayer. It also cited Senior Superintendent of the Police (SSP) West who confirmed the murder and called it a “targeted killing”. The Police official added that two unknown individuals on a bike approached the deceased and fired three shots.
The police official said that the forensic team had recovered the mobile phone and other valuables from Tariq. However, the family of the slain terrorist Rahim Ullah has rejected the enmity accusations. This was reportedly the 19th terrorist shot dead in Pakistan this year by unknown gunmen.
This comes less than a week after Akram Khan Ghazi, a senior commander of the Pakistan-based terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), was killed by unidentified bike-borne assailants in the Bajaur district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
As per the reports, Ghazi was a recruiter for LeT who had radicalised many terrorists who had infiltrated the Kashmir Valley in several batches in recent years.
The news of Tariq and Ghazi’s deaths emerges amid a string of mysterious killings of terrorists in Pakistan by unknown assailants over the past few weeks. These incidents appear to follow a pattern of unidentified individuals carrying out similar mysterious killings of terrorists in the country in recent weeks.
Earlier, on 5th November, Khwaja Shahid, also known as Mia Mujahid, a key commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba and one of the masterminds of the 2018 terrorist attack on an Indian Army camp in Sunjuwan, which left six people dead, was reportedly abducted and then found beheaded close to the Line of Control in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
Similarly, one of the masterminds of the Dhangri terror attack, Riyaz Ahmad alias Abu Qasim, was shot and killed in September inside a mosque in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir by unidentified gunmen.
In another such incident, an anonymous assassin shot dead a key Hizbul Mujahideen commander Bashir Ahmad Peer also known as Imtiyaz Alam in Rawalpindi in March of this year.
Former Al-Badr Mujahideen commander Syed Khalid Raza was eliminated in Karachi in February by unidentified gunmen in what the police called a targeted strike. Aijaz Ahmad Ahangar, a terrorist from Kashmir who served as the chief commander of the international terror organisation Islamic State was discovered dead in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province earlier this year. Taliban had reportedly assassinated him.