NEW DELHI: Naveed Jutt, the top Pakistani terrorist who made a dramatic escape from a Srinagar hospital in February this year, had killed journalist Shujaat Bukhari on the eve of Eid earlier this month. Jutt, who was acting on orders from the Lashkar-e-Taiba leadership in Pakistan, was one of the three terrorists on a bike who pulled the trigger, top Kashmir police officer Swayam Prakash Pani announced on Thursday.
Shujaat Bukhari, the editor of Rising Kashmir, was shot dead on June 14 when he left his office and got into his car to go to an Iftaar party. The three killers, who came on a bike, opened fire at the 52-year-old journalist and his two security guards. All of them died; the journalist was hit with 17 bullets.

This is the first major terror attack in which Naveed Jutt has been named after his escape, which was seen as an indictment of the security protocol at the Srinagar central jail and led to the unceremonious ouster of the state’s top prisons official SK Mishra.

A video of the terrorist had emerged on social media within weeks. In this, Jutt was seen in fatigues, a rifle in hand, walking up to a group of five armed terrorists including a Hizbul Mujahideen commander in a forested area of south Kashmir.

A probe into the Laskhar commander’s escape had revealed that the plan to get the Pakistani terrorist released had been in the works for four months.

The terrorist, who also goes by the name Abu Hanzullah, is from Multan in Pakistan and was known to be close to Abu Qasim, who headed the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir and was killed by security forces in 2015.

Mr Pani, who released photographs of the four LeT operatives said Naveed Jutt was accompanied by Muzaffar Ahmad of Qazigund and Azad Ahmad Malik of Bijbehara.

Also involved in the killing was Sajad Gul, a Kashmiri who left India after getting the passport fraudulently in March 2017 and operates out of Pakistan.

Police said Gul was “associated with Lashkar” and had been arrested twice in the past, once by the Delhi Police in 2002 and by the Srinagar police in 2016 in terror-related cases.

Mr Pani said investigations had established there was a campaign on certain social media platforms against Shujaat Bukhari, spreading hate, malicious and intimidating content against him. This was to build the psychological ground for the assassination.