NEW DELHI: In what seems like a well planned and cleanly executed manoeuvre, Shahid Bilal - one of IndiaÂ’s most wanted terrorist and accused of the recent Hyderabad bombings - was reportedly killed in Karachi on August 30.According to Central Intelligence sources his end came abruptly at the hands of two motorcycle borne assailants who shot him dead at point blank range near area called Gulburg Churangi also known as Golimar Churangi in Karachi.
In a meticulously carried out operation the assailants followed Bilal, who was also travelling on a motorcycle, before shooting him at a location from where the sped off without leaving their trace. BilalÂ’s end came within 5 days after he executed the Hyderabad blast on August 25 has baffled the people in the Indian security establishment.
Sources in the Indian intelligence agencies claim that they got the news of BilalÂ’s murder on September 5 after which they tried to get it confirmed through the informal sources in Pakistan. The confirmation came on Tuesday.
It was indeed Mohammed Abdul Shahid alias Bilal, a native of Mosarambagh in Hyderabad accused of the two other terror attacks in Hyderabad, the Special Task Force headquarters and the blasts at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. It was from Karachi that Bilal was supervising all cross-border terror acts, the officials said.
Still trying to ascertain the real motives behind Bilal’s murder, intelligence sources have two plausible reasons to offer – that either he was killed in inter-gang or even intra-gang rivalry or the ISI chose to bump him off as he was attracting too much media attention and was the most hunted terror suspect on the radar of Indian intelligence agencies, who would have done their best to pin down Pakistan.
But the argument explaining ISI’s hand behind Bilal’s murder seems a little far fetched as the agency is coping well to keep most of the terrorists wanted by India in safe havens. “What seems a more plausible theory is that whether there was a foreign hand in bumping him off?
If that was the case then it signifies a great challenge for Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence,” said an independent security analyst not willing to identify himself.