Has LeT terrorist Qaiser Farooq been shot dead in Karachi?

It seems that Karachi has become the graveyard of anti-India terrorists with the reported gunning down of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative Qaiser Farooq on Saturday.

An unverified video of a man being shot dead in Karachi while his colleagues flee in fear is being touted to be of Qaiser Farooq. Pakistani newspaper Dawn, however, mentions a targeted attack and identifies the dead of one Farooq, but does not mention his terror links or that he was associated with LeT.

Farooq is said to be one of the founding members of globally-designated terror organisation LeT which had carried out the 26/11 terrorist attacks and siege of prominent landmarks in Mumbai killing nearly 175 people and injuring 300. The killed included foreign tourists and Jews who had been targeted.

Dawn quoted police officer, SSP Faisal Abdullah Chachar, as saying that “it appeared to be a targeted killing as nothing was snatched from the victims”.

Meanwhile, news has been circulating for the past few days that LeT chief and internationally proscribed terror leader, Hafeez Saeed’s son – Kamaluddin Saeed has been missing for nearly a week. Many news reports have even claimed that Kamaluddin Saeed was killed after his abduction in Peshawar last Tuesday.

Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI, which has supported terror organisations against India has not been able to trace Kamaluddin Saeed.

The purported killing of Farooq is the latest in a long list of Kashmiri and Khalistani terrorists to have been killed mysteriously in Pakistan over the past couple of years in numerous cities – Karachi, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Peshawar.

Just a few days earlier, another LeT terrorist Maulana Ziaur Rehman was shot dead in Gulistan-e-Jauhar in Karachi. He was killed by two unidentified men in a park during an evening stroll.

A few months back, in a similar Karachi killing, the Sindhudesh Revolutionary Army (SRA) had claimed that its operatives had shot dead Khalid Raza – a former commander of Al Badr, ‘fondly’ recalled by the Pakistani media as a “renowned educationist”. He was killed outside his home by a single shot to his head by unidentified gunmen.

Interestingly, in none of the dozen cases of the mysterious deaths of terror leaders in Pakistan, arrests have been made by Pakistani agencies.