KASHMIR: With his new prison hair cut, lean from weeks spent training as a jihadi (holy Muslim warrior) in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Mohammad Abdullah seems even younger than the 17 years he claims to be, reports Rahul Bedi.
But to the 28 people he massacred in Jammu and Kashmir in July, including 10 women and eight children, the slight youngster from Multan in Pakistan's border Punjab province who operated under the code name Abu Talah, was considerably more fearsome.
"I was not happy about it [killing innocent people] but my controllers in Pakistan said it was necessary to establish terror" Abdullah said in an exclusive interview in Jammu, capital of the insurgency ridden Himalayan state that Islamabad also claims.
"I had my orders and had to follow them. It was not a question of liking the job but simply executing it" declared Abdullah who was recruited into the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT or Army of the Pure) militant group based at Mudrike near the border city of Lahore by its propaganda secretary whilst in the eighth class.
The LeT is the militant wing of the Markaz Dawa-ul-Irshad, a fundamentalist centre for religious learning set up in 1987. Its founding head Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, a professor at Lahore's University of Engineering and Technology believes that the necessity for jihad has always existed and considers democracy to be one of the "menaces" inherited from the alien West .
Supported by Pakistan's shadowy Inter Services Intelligence, LeT cadres began operating in Kashmir's 13-year old civil war in 1993 with the aim of achieving Muslim unity through religious motivation. Its members are all non-Kashmris, mostly Pakistanis and Afghans and several have been involved in Afghanistan's civil wars. LeT cadres were also killed in the US-led battle for the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif last October.
Abdullah underwent training in guerilla warfare including weapon and explosives training alongside 50 other youths at Aska near Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir for around 10 weeks. He also attended Islamic classes where he was influenced to wage Jihad in Kashmir to "liberate" fellow Muslims .
The jihad trainees were told that thousands of Muslims were being butchered in Kashmir. "It made me very angry," he said. Along with Mohammad Adnan, another teenage LeT militant he was ferried to Jammu and within hours of arriving had emptied four AK 47 assault rifle magazines of 32 rounds each and lobbed five grenades inside a crowded labourer colony. Adnan was shot dead by the police on August 2nd and Abdullah was arrested a day later.