Indian police have conducted sweeping raids targeting a banned Islamist political party in disputed Kashmir, days after the deadliest blast in the Indian capital in more than a decade.
There has been no confirmation that the searches this week are connected to Monday’s explosion – which killed at least 12 people near the historic Red Fort in the capital’s Old Delhi quarter.
But the raids represent a renewed effort by police to tighten security after the explosion, which the government called ‘a heinous terror incident’ and blamed on ‘anti-national forces’.
Many of the raids have taken place since Wednesday, according to district police statements from across the Indian-administered part of the Himalayan territory.
Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independence from British rule in 1947, and both claim the Himalayan territory in full. Tensions remain high between New Delhi and Islamabad.
Police, including in Kashmir’s Awantipora, Bandipora, Ganderbal, Shopian and Sopore districts, issued statements about the raids, which they said targeted the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) party.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government banned the Kashmir branch of Jamaat-e-Islami in 2019 as an ‘unlawful association’.
Officers carried out ‘extensive raids at multiple locations’ to ‘dismantle the terror ecosystem and its support structures’, the police in Awantipora said in a statement.
The department in Bandipora said they had seized ‘incriminating material’, while the Sopore police said it had carried out ‘large-scale operations against Jamaat-e-Islami-linked networks’, adding that more than 30 locations were searched.
Officers also raided Al-Falah University in Faridabad, on the southern outskirts of the capital, while security forces on Friday demolished a house in Kashmir’s Pulwama district.
Police have not commented on the demolition, although law enforcement agencies have carried out such destruction against those accused of launching attacks in the past.
India’s anti-terrorism National Investigation Agency is leading the probe into Monday’s blast, and the government has vowed to bring the ‘perpetrators, their collaborators, and their sponsors’ to justice.
But officials, so far, have given little further information on who that might be – and whether it was a homegrown group or had links from abroad.
Indian media have widely connected the November 10 blast with a string of arrests just hours before, when they seized explosive materials and assault rifles.
Police said those arrested were linked with Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a Pakistan-based and Al-Qaeda linked group, and Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind, a Kashmir offshoot linked to JeM.
Concerning those arrests, India’s Jammu and Kashmir police said on Monday – shortly before the explosion – that their investigations had ‘revealed a white collar terror ecosystem, involving radicalised professionals and students in contact with foreign handlers, operating from Pakistan and other countries’.
The blast in Delhi was the most significant security incident since April 22, when 26 mainly Hindu civilians were killed at the tourist site of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir, triggering clashes with Pakistan.
