Lashkar boss Hafiz Saeed was in Poonch, week before brutal killings of jawans

New Delhi, Jan 10: Lashkar-e-Taiba (now Jamaat-ud-Dawah) chief and 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed was in the Pak-Occupied Kashmir's Poonch a week before the brutal killing of two Army jawans took place near Mendhar across the Line of Control, intelligence sources said. Intelligence reports say, Saeed was inciting Lashkar's BATs (border action teams), consisting of jihadis and trained militants to step up activity along the LoC, obviously on the instructions of his mentors in the ISI, the Pakistani super-spy agency.The jihadis provide active support to Pakistani army soldiers to create mischief across the Line of Control, where the ceasefire declared during former President Pervez Musharraf's rule had been holding for the last ten years. The ceasefire across LoC started in 2003.The jihadis' help comes in handy for the Pakistani soldiers, who find it difficult to push in militants to India, because of construction of observation posts by the Indian Army across the Line of Control. It was the construction of one such observation post close to the LoC that resulted in Pakistani troops first carrying out firing, and then stealthily entering and brutally killing Indian army jawans, while taking away the head of one of them. Pakistan had created the right scenario for the attack days before by alleging that Indian soldiers violated the LoC killing one of their soldiers. According to a senior army officer, infiltration attempts have beenon the rise as Pakistan is trying its best to disturb the current peaceful scenario in Kashmir. An internal Indian army post-mortem of the recent attack has revealed that the Northern Command's alert after a skirmish at Haji Pir (300 km from Mendhar) on Sunday, in which a Pakistani soldier was killed, did not reach all posts. “We should have anticipated a retaliation from Pakistan, though we did not expect the barbaric mutilation,” an army officer said.