After 15-year silence, JuD backs LeT, tweets praise for Pampore attack

SRINAGAR: Hizb-ul-Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin hailed three slain Lashkar-e-Taiba militants for giving “a tough fight” to Indian security forces during the Pampore encounter even as J&K police and paramilitary forces safely evacuated his younger son Syed Mueen, a computer analyst working at the Entrepreneurship Development Institute, just before the three militants stormed the government building last Saturday.Mueen, 31, said he was not interrogated or harassed by the security forces when they came to know his identity. “They treated me like they treated (around 100) other staffers and rescued us from the building so that we weren’t caught in the crossfire,” he said.Mujataba Gillian, IG (Kashmir range) corroborated Mueen’s account.Soon after the Army called off the encounter on Monday after killing the militants, Salahuddin not only lauded the “support” of locals to them, but also announced Hilal-eShuja’at, a ‘gallantry award’, for the militants.All four sons and a daughter of Salahuddin, who had crossed over to Pakistan in the 1990s, are J&K government staffers. One of his sons is a doctor in a government medical college, another a hospital lab technician. Salahuddin’s daughter works in the state education department.