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Jagtar Singh Hawara Jagtar Singh Hawara Babbar Khalsa Afghanistan/South Asia 20050609  

India-Pakistan
Pak Army officers suspected in Mumbai attacks
2010-02-26
[Dawn] A serving Pakistani Army officer has been named in one of the three dossiers handed over by India to Pakistan for his suspected involvement in the Mumbai terror attacks, reports DawnNews.

The dossier has also named another retired Major and two other officers as 'Major Iqbal' and 'Major Samir Ali.

The three dossiers were handed over during the Indo-Pak Foreign secretary level talks.

The role of 'Major Iqbal' is believed to have emerged in the interrogation by the FBI of US terror suspect David Headley, arrested in Chicago in September last year in connection with the Mumbai attack.

India has named eight people, including 'Major Iqbal' and Hafiz Saeed, the leader of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa.

India wants Pakistan to take action against these men and then hand them over to India.

One of the dossiers also demands the handing over of seven Khalistani militants, in which four of seven Khalsitani militants were named as Jagtar Singh Hawara alias Tara, Ranjeet Singh alias Neeta, Harminder Singh and Lakhvinder singh alias Rody. Seventeen Indian Mujahideen terrorists which includes five Pakistani nationals for their role in subversive activities.
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India-Pakistan
Death for two in Beant Singh assassination case
2007-07-31
CHANDIGARH: A special trial court on Tuesday sentenced two Babbar Khalsa terrorists to death for the 1995 assassination of then Punjab chief minister Beant Singh.

Additional District and Sessions Judge Ravi Kumar Sondhi pronounced the death sentence for Jagtar Singh Hawara, the mastermind, and Balwant Singh.

The judge awarded life imprisonment to three others, Shamsher Singh, Gurmeet Singh and Lakhwinder Singh, who were convicted last week for conspiring to assassinate Beant Singh.

A suicide bomber, Dilawar Singh, killed the chief minister as he came out of his office at the high security Punjab civil secretariat in Chandigarh on August 31, 1995.

Balwant Singh was the second human bomb, to be used in case the first suicide bomber failed to kill Beant Singh.

A sixth person convicted in the same case under the Explosives Act, Naseeb Singh, was awarded 10 years imprisonment by the court on Tuesday. Since he has already spent 12 years in prison, he is likely to be let off.

All six were last week convicted by the special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in the conspiracy of assassinating Beant Singh, who became chief minister in 1992.

Beant Singh, along with "super cop" K P S Gill, was largely credited with wiping out terrorism from Punjab by dealing with terrorists with an iron hand.
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Afghanistan/South Asia
New breed of Khalistan terrorists in it just for the money
2005-07-05
There was never a doubt that the dark days of the 80s and the early 90s in Punjab had left a residue that will take forever to be wiped out. Yet, when the Delhi Police arrested Jagtar Singh Hawara on June 8 in connection with the blasts in two movie halls in the capital last month, the Punjab Police was first embarrassed and then stunned. What came out of the interrogation and raids across Punjab was no small residue. Hawara, the main accused in the Beant Singh assassination case and chief of Indian operations of the Babbar Khalsa International, had apparently planned to do much more. Punjab’s director-general of police, S.S. Virk, said Hawara’s men were possibly planning to abduct VIPs and secure his release. The news of Hawara’s arrest was in itself a shocker for the Punjab Police. But their faces turned red when they realised that Hawara had spent most of the past 18 months right under their noses: marrying a girl in Ludhiana district; visiting a woman in Hoshiarpur district; setting up home in Patiala district; and hobnobbing with fellow-conspirators in Nawanshahar district. Within a fortnight of Hawara’s arrest, anti-terrorist squads in the districts caught 24 Babbar Khalsa members and seized huge caches of explosives.

The police saw a smart pattern in the way the Babbars were regrouping and recruiting the youth. They were no more the hardcore fundamentalists. Shorn of orthodoxy and dogma, the new age Babbars sported trimmed beards and short hair, and had Hindu buddies working with them. They were no longer from the rural base and the hideouts were in the cities. Unlike the illiterate ones who carried AK-47s in the 80s, they were educated with a modern outlook. In fact, they wanted to be paid overseas for the work done here. Liberal funds from abroad, made available through the hawala route, meant they did not have to demand protection money or ransom at gunpoint. According to Virk, Hawara got Rs 50 lakh in the one year after his escape.

Hawara and his men lured the youth promising a one-way journey to Europe or North America. That probably explains why even Hindus and women joined him. Though there is not a visible groundswell of support for the Babbar Khalsa, the police think the numbers may come as a surprise. Their dependence on Pakistan continues. "There are just two or three trainers and five or six getting trained at a time, but there are small bases in Pakistan," said Virk. Khalistan is no longer the goal, though it may be the dream of some politicians. But it is definitely the nine-letter word that gets them dollars.
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Afghanistan/South Asia
Indians arrest Sikh suicide bomber
2005-06-28
An alleged member of the Sikh militant group Babbar Khalsa who was to be used as a human bomb was arrested in New Delhi, Delhi Police claimed on Monday. Satnam Singh, Police said, had been prepared by the militant group to be a suicide bomber. The Crime Branch of the Delhi Policealso recovered some arms and ammunitions from his possession. "We are investigating who or what the possible targets could be," a police official said.

Babbar Khalsa was one of the main militant outfits operating in Punjab (North India) during the militancy era in the state in mid-1980s. In the past one month, Indian Police has made series of arrests of the militants allegedly belonging to the Babbar Khalsa outfit.

Earlier this month, Delhi Police had arrested Jagtar Singh Hawara, chief of Babbar Khalsa's India operations, along with two others in connection with the twin bomb blasts in two cinema hallsin Delhi on May 22. One person was killed and over 60 injured when blasts rocked the capital's Satyam and Liberty theaters during the screening of the controversial Hindi language film "Jo Bole Se Nihaal."
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Afghanistan/South Asia
K.P.S. Gill's post mortem of the Khalistan movement
2005-06-15
The transformation of an indigenous uprising in Punjab during the 80's into a proxy war was very much the model repeated in Kashmir in the 90's. However the training and deployment of Jihadis for Kashmir had far greater consequences than training a bunch of angry Sikhs.
With the arrest of Jagtar Singh Hawara, the Babbar Khalsa International's (BKI) 'operations chief' in India, on June 8, 2005, the curtain has rolled down on another chapter of the long saga of Pakistan's failed attempts to revive Khalistani terrorism in Punjab. Hawara fell quickly into the net as the leader of the circle of conspirators who engineered the Delhi Cinema Hall Blasts on May 22, 2005. The rapidity with which this 'terrorist module' unravelled is an important index of the state of the Khalistani movement and of what was once the most feared terrorist organisation in the Punjab. The disruption of a single cell would ordinarily not be expected to lead to the arrest of the 'operations chief' of a group such as the BKI - one of the first groups to take to terrorism in the Punjab in the end-Nineteen Seventies, and regarded as the most ideologically driven and violent organisation among the proliferation of gangs that overran Punjab through the Eighties and early Nineties. The operational leadership is normally insulated by significant layers and 'circuit breakers', so that the arrest of one of the 'foot soldiers' cannot lead beyond the immediate cell. Hawara, who had evaded arrest since his sensational escape from the Burail Jail in Chandigarh on January 21, 2004, clearly lacked the organisational depth that could isolate him from the bottom rung of what are evidently mercenary and most unreliable operatives. It is significant that none of the other conspirators in the present case fit the profile of the traditional and deeply conservative BKI activist. Two are Hindus, and the others have an evident taste for the 'good life' and a hankering to go abroad - legally or otherwise. That Hawara was in direct contact with, and exposed to, the likes of these indicates the degree to which the ideologically motivated Khalistani recruitment base has simply vanished from Punjab.

This is despite frenetic efforts by Pakistan to keep the 'defeated rump of Khalistani terrorist organisations', (as I have described them elsewhere) alive; and despite significant flows of funding, support and propaganda from minuscule and increasingly isolated groups among Non Resident Indian (NRI) Sikhs. While Hawara and Jaspal Singh 'masterminded' the operation in India, they were functioning under the direct control of Wadhawa Singh, the BKI 'chief', who continues to enjoy Pakistani hospitality ever since he fled the fighting in Punjab in the late 1980s. The group was coordinated through Satnam Singh Satta Mallian, Wadhawa Singh's son-in-law, propped up by his Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) handlers, who is currently taking advantage of the laxity of German law in Stuttgart, to manage the movement and operations of BKI cadres, who have a presence in several European countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway and the United Kingdom. BKI is also active in Canada and USA. It is on the list of terrorist organisations in both the US and UK.
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Afghanistan/South Asia
Cinema blasts: India arrests top Sikh rebel
2005-06-09
Police in the Indian capital on Wednesday arrested three men, including a top Sikh militant and the main accused in the bombing of two cinemas last month that killed one person and wounded dozens. The men are members of Sikh militant group Babbar Khalsa, which wants an independent Sikh state, a police spokesman said. The arrests in a Delhi suburb took the number of people held over the May 22 blasts to eight.

"Jagtar Singh Hawara is the head of Babbar Khalsa and there was a price of 500,000 rupees ($11,500) for his arrest. He is wanted for the assassination of Beant Singh among other cases," the spokesman said. Another of those arrested on Wednesday was the mastermind behind the home-made bomb blasts that tore through the cinemas in Delhi, the spokesman said. "We suspect they were in Delhi to collect some money and flee the country. Some guns and a huge amount of explosives were recovered from them," he added.
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