New Delhi: Two Kashmiri locals are in jail for allegedly harboring the trio in the Pahalgam attack case. pakistani terrorist The catastrophe of April 22, 2025, the night before the incident, could have been easily prevented, and 26 civilians could have been saved from being brutally gunned down in front of their families.Hours before the fateful incident unfolded, at around 12.30 am on that fateful day, Parvez Ahmed and Bashir Ahmed Jothad had spotted three terrorists – later identified as Faisal Jatt alias Suleman Shah, Habib Tahir alias Jibran and Hamza Afghani – hiding behind a fence in Baisaran. Considering that the attackers had visited the homes of Bashir and Pervez only an evening earlier – during which they spoke in an Urdu-Punjabi mix – with sophisticated weapons and had talked about Ali Bhai (an alias used by key accused Sajid Jutt, a top Lashkar-e-Taiba/The Resistance Front commander based in Pakistan’s Kasur region), sources said it was clear to both of them that a terrorist attack in the area was imminent. was imminent.

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Both took Rs 3,000 from terrorists, gave them shelter and maintained silence

The two – who had taken Rs 3,000 from the terrorists in exchange for harboring and facilitating them – maintained silence when they could have easily called the police or alerted the association of local tourist operators about the sighting of terrorists in the area. Investigation revealed that they remained silent even after the terrorists left their house after spending five hours and having food at around 10.30 pm on April 21, 2025. While leaving, the terrorists had packed some food and borrowed a cooking pot, blankets and a tarpaulin sheet.Although Bashir and Parvez had seen the terrorists near the Baisaran fence, they moved to a distant location with their ponies and waited for their tourist customers to return. Between 1 pm and 1.30 pm, Bashir and Parvez ferried the tourists back to Pahalgam on their ponies. A few hours later, when he finally heard about the gory killings in Baisaran by the same terrorists he had sheltered, he quietly and immediately left his dhok (temporary mountain hut) and went into hiding.The NIA eventually caught hold of the duo and arrested them on June 22, 2025. The duo was chargesheeted in December 2025 along with Sajid Jatt, three Pakistani attackers (deceased) and LeT/TRF as an entity.Sources in the agencies told TOI on Tuesday that the Pakistan link to the Pahalgam terror plot was confirmed by Facebook, which detected a misleading post being circulated in India on Pakistani phone numbers in Bahawalpur and Rawalpindi, claiming ‘Jibran was our man’.