The arrest of five suspected RAW-linked operatives in Muzaffarabad amid fresh tensions in Azad Jammu and Kashmir has reopened a larger question for Pakistan’s security establishment: how far has India’s covert playbook shifted from conventional espionage to digitally managed assassinations, local recruitment and instant media exploitation?
The question has acquired new urgency after the killing of a 30-year-old Kashmiri-origin educationist, Hamza Burhan, who was shot outside a private college in Muzaffarabad on May 21. Burhan, who had fled Indian-occupied Pulwama in January 2018, had built a civilian life in AJK as a school principal, married into a Kashmiri migrant family and was father to a young child.
According to intelligence sources, individuals arrested in Chhela, Muzaffarabad, had automatic weapons, grenades, communication equipment, sensitive documents and maps of key locations and were planning attacks on sensitive installations.
The bust came as AJK is already politically charged by protests, arrests, deaths and a widening confrontation between the regional government and the recently proscribed Joint Awami Action Committee.
Pakistani security officials say the murder was not a local dispute but part of a foreign covert campaign.
Deadly clashes in and around Rawalakot ahead of the JAAC’s June 9 protest call left 11 people dead and more than 70 injured. Regional officials said four police officers and a passerby were killed when “miscreants” opened fire, while six protesters died in the law-enforcement response. Police also reported 23 security officials and 50 protesters injured, along with 30 arrests.
Interestingly, the deeper dispute centres around the 12 reserved seats for Kashmiri refugees settled in Pakistan. The JAAC wants those seats abolished, while the AJK government argues that constitutional questions cannot be settled through street agitation. That is precisely where the internal and external dangers meet.
Back to the school principal, whose killing was almost instantaneously framed as the elimination of a man wanted in the 2019 Pulwama attack. To Pakistani investigators and Kashmiri refugee circles, it smacks of a different agenda altogether: the targeted killing of an Indian citizen who had crossed into AJK in 2018, rebuilt his life as an educationist, and was later hunted through a digital chain allegedly linked to Indian handlers.
Pakistani security officials say the murder was not a local dispute but part of a foreign covert campaign. According to sources privy to the investigation, the arrested suspect, Abdullah Kamal of Wah Cantt, told interrogators that he had been contacted through Instagram by a woman claiming to be Indian and sympathetic to his ideological leanings. The entire riveting story has also been corroborated by investigative reporter Umar Cheema on his social media platform. Anyhow, in a true Bollywood-esque manner, the contact allegedly moved from casual messaging to operational direction through a virtual UK SIM card and Telegram, where target details, location cues and coordinates of the school were shared. Sources claim Kamal was already sent Rs 50,000 and also promised further rewards. He allegedly collected a pistol and ammunition from a cache near Islamabad, spent days practising, travelled to Muzaffarabad, checked into a guesthouse close to the school and surveyed the target area before the attack.
Some in New Delhi have now gone on to describe Burhan as a Pulwama mastermind, an Al-Badr figure and an operative under Pakistani protection. Scroll reported that he had been ambushed in Muzaffarabad and later died in Rawalpindi.
Local accounts challenge the Indian version. The victims’ friends insist he was an educationist who left Pulwama more than a year before the 2019 Pulwama attack. Indian law-enforcement agencies had reportedly been looking for him since 2022, when he was designated under India’s anti-terror framework. That timeline matters. If he had, indeed, left the Valley in January 2018 and India later linked him to Pulwama, the allegation requires scrutiny rather than repetition.
Refugee leader Uzair Ghazali has, meanwhile, argued that thousands of Kashmiris fleeing repression, arrests and violence in Indian-occupied Kashmir have rebuilt their lives in Azad Kashmir. The senior leader of post-1989 migrants was quoted by Tariq Naqash, Muzaffarabad-based journalist, as dismissing Indian claims as “yet another clumsy allegation the Indian government is notorious for coining to bracket Kashmiris’ rightful freedom movement with terrorism and satisfy its fanatic vote bank.”
As per security officials, the killing and the narrative were two stages of the same operation: first, the physical elimination of a Kashmiri migrant; second, the conversion of that killing into a headline validating India’s long-standing claims.
The allegation of Indian involvement is not being treated by Pakistani officials as an isolated claim. Analysts and security sources point to a wider pattern in which India’s external intelligence network has been accused of extraterritorial killings in Pakistan and of targeting Sikh figures abroad. Azad Kashmir has itself seen the same script play before, when on September 8, 2023, Muhammad Riaz, an anti-India activist with alleged links with the proscribed Jamaat-ud-Dawa, was gunned down inside a mosque in Rawalakot.
Investigators say Kamal’s case illustrates how foreign intelligence agencies can recruit disaffected young men through social media. The amount allegedly offered was small, but that is precisely what should prompt a serious line of action. In the new model of covert action, a hostile agency does not need to send a trained operative across the border if it can use artificial intelligence to identify vulnerable locals through their social media posts, flatter their beliefs and spoon-feed them tales of grievances, promise undue rewards in the world and Hereafter and then turn this grotesque act of terror into yet another breaking news cycle to satiate their own whims.
These are terrifying times. India may still call this strategy security or counterterrorism; Orwell had the colder name for it: political language making “lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
The writer is OpEd Editor (Daily Times) and can be reached at durenayab786 @gmail.com. Shetweets @DureAkram.