Delhi police takes down terror alert notice after Pakistan identifies ‘operatives’ as students

In a major embarrassment to the Delhi police, the Delhi police officials had to take down posters it had put up across the city on November 20, showing two alleged Jaish-e-Mohammad operatives.

According to a report in Dawn, a seminary in Pakistan claimed that they were its students and had “never visited India”. The administrator of Jamia Imdadia, Mufti Zahid said both the students—Nadeem and Tayyab—of his seminary were present in Faisalabad and they had never visited India.

In a press conference where the two boys were also present, Mufti Zahid said both of them were students of the seminary for the last couple of years. He said both had visited Lahore some days ago to attend the Tablighi congregation at Raiwind and then went to Ganda Singh border to watch the flag-lowering ceremony. He said they had taken pictures along a milestone which showed the distance to Dehli and Ferozepur and shared a picture on the social media, reported the Dawn.

The same picture was used by the Delhi police and newspapers in India in the alert. It showed both the students leaning on the milestone.

The Delhi police also released a photograph of them leaning on a milestone which reads 'Delhi 360 km, Ferozepur 9 km' in dark kurtas and religious headgear. Ferozepur is located on the India-Pakistan border in Punjab.

The Delhi police said they assumed that this was Firozpur, a town in India’s Punjab, which is just 133 km from Amritsar and hence security in Delhi was put on high alert.

The police took down posters the same day when Zahid addressed the press conference. According to a report on Hindustan Times, an officer from the special cell confirmed that the posters were taken down on Monday. However, he said that they had received the intelligence agencies.