On Friday June 3, Ilyas Kashmiri was reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike. Kashmiri headed the Islamist terror group called Harkatul Jihad Islami. Following the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1 (local time), it was briefly postulated that Kashmiri was a candidate to take over as the acting head of al-Qaeda. He was head of an al-Qaeda unit known as the 313 brigade.
According to the U.S. State Department, Kashmiri had given the orders for a combined ballistic and bomb attack upon the regional headquarters of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, in Lahore, Punjab province. That attack on the twin buildings of the local Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) on May 27, 2009 killed 35 people, including seven agency personnel. A senior ISI figure, identified as Colonel Amir, was among the dead.
Kashmiri had also been closely linked to the people who kidnapped a Hindu Pakistani film-maker called Satish Anand, who was snatched in the port city of Karachi in the south of Pakistan in October 2008. Anand was freed in April 2009 after a ransom was paid, with Ilyas Kashmiri involved in the negotiations. Though kidnapped in the south, Anand had been released in North Waziristan, in the north of Pakistan.
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