TRF head Sheikh Sajjad Gul identified as mastermind behind Pahalgam attack

Sheikh Sajjad Gul, a 50-year-old Kashmiri and head of Lashkar-e-Taiba proxy The Resistance Front (TRF), has emerged as the mastermind of the Pahalgam terror attack, which claimed the lives of 26 people, mostly tourists, on April 22, officials said Wednesday.

Holed up in the Cantonment town of Rawalpindi, Pakistan, under the patronage of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Gul, who also goes by the alias of Sajjad Ahmed Sheikh, has been a planner of a number of terror attacks, including targeted killings between 2020 and 2024 in Central and South Kashmir, grenade attacks in Central Kashmir in 2023, ambush of J&K police personnel in Bijbehra in Anantnag, Gagangir, Z-Morh Tunnel attack in Ganderbal.

The NIA had designated him a terrorist in April 2022 and kept a reward of Rs 10 lakh on his head.

The official said that during the investigation into the deadly April 22 Pahalgam attack, links and some communications have been traced back to Gul. The TRF had claimed responsibility for the attack.

The group, under Gul's instruction, had shot 25 tourists at point-blank range after asking their religion in Pahalgam on April 22. A local tourist guide was also killed by the terrorists.

Used by Pakistan's external snooping agency ISI as a Kashmiri face of the local Punjabi-dominated Lashkar-e-Taiba, Sheikh was educated in Srinagar and did his MBA from Bangalore, later pivoting to a lab technician course in Kerala. He returned to the Valley, where he opened a diagnostic lab and started providing logistical support to the terror group.

During his work as an overground worker (OGW) of the terror group, Gul was caught by the Special Cell of the Delhi police in 2002 from Nizamuddin Railway Station with 5 kilograms of RDX. It was revealed that he was conducting a recce and conspiring to conduct serial blasts in the national capital, for which he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment on August 7, 2003.

He moved to Pakistan after his release from prison in 2017, where the ISI chose him to lead a proxy of the LeT The Resistance Front (TRF) in Kashmir in 2019 to give it a facade of an indigenous terror movement of Jammu and Kashmir.

The creation of TRF was a strategy of the ISI in the aftermath of the Pulwama incident in February 2019, when Pakistan had come to the adverse notice of the world for sponsoring and harbouring terror outfits like LeT and JeM.

His brother, an ex-doctor in Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital, Srinagar, was also a terrorist in the 1990s who had migrated to Saudi Arabia and later to Pakistan, where he is now involved in terror funding with fugitives in Gulf countries.