Two locals charged could have avoided April 22 terror attack

New Delhi: Two Kashmiri locals jailed for allegedly harboring three persons in Pahalgam attack case pakistani terrorist The night before the incident – the chaos of April 22, 2025 could have easily been prevented and the brutal shooting of 26 civilians in front of their families.At around 12:30 pm on that fateful day, a few hours before the horrific incident, Parvaiz Ahmed and Bashir Ahmed Chausad spotted three terrorists – later identified as Faisal Jat alias Suleiman Shah, Habib Tahir alias Jibran and Hamza al-Afghani – hiding behind a fence in Baisaran. Given that the attackers had visited Bashir and Parwaiz’s home just the night before, armed with sophisticated weapons, conversing in an accented mix of Urdu and Punjabi, and talking about Ali Bhai (the alias used by the main defendant, Sajid Jat, a senior Lashkar-e-Taiba/Resistance Front commander in Kasur, Pakistan), the sources said the pair were well aware that a terrorist attack was imminent in the area.

Duo took 3,000 people away from terrorists, gave them shelter but chose to remain silent

The duo accepted Rs 3,000 from the terrorists in exchange for shelter and facilitation. They could have easily called the police or informed the local tour operators association about the sighting of terrorists in the area, but instead they chose to remain silent. Investigation revealed that even though the terrorists left their home at around 10:30 pm on April 21, 2025, they remained silent after eating for 5 hours. On leaving, the terrorists packed some food and borrowed cooking utensils, blankets and tarps.Although Bashir and Parvaiz found the terrorists near the Baisaran fence, they simply moved to a distant place with their ponies and waited for the tourists to return. From 1 to 1:30 pm, Bashir and Parvaiz took tourists back to Pahalgam on ponies. Hours later, when they finally heard that the terrorists they had sheltered had committed gruesome murders in Baisaran, they immediately and quietly abandoned their dhoks (makeshift mountain huts) and went into hiding.The NIA finally caught the duo and arrested them on June 22, 2025. The two were charged in December 2025 along with Sajid Jatt, three Pakistani attackers (deceased) and LeT/TRF as one entity.Sources in the agencies told TOI on Tuesday that Pakistan’s links to the Pahalgam terror plot were further confirmed by Facebook, which traced a misleading post circulating in India claiming “Gibran is one of ours” and Pakistani phone numbers in Bahawalpur and Rawalpindi.