New Delhi, June 4
With the reported killing of Ilyas Kashmiri in a drone strike in Pakistan, the security agencies can heave a sigh of relief as the notorious terrorist was the "chief trouble- maker" for India and had dodged death on number of occasions in the past.

Accused of planning and giving shape to the 2008 Mumbai attack that left 166 persons dead, Kashmiri had emerged as the single biggest enemy of not only India but also of Pakistan and the US. No wonder, his name prominently figured in the list of most-wanted terrorists that the US and India recently handed over to Pakistan.

Kashmir was considered by the US as a possible successor to Osama bin Laden. He has been linked to several terror plots in Pakistan, the latest being at Mehran military base on May 22. He was directly responsible for attacks on the ISI office in Lahore in 2009. He is also suspected to be behind the audacious attack on the Pakistan Army Headquarters in Rawalpindi in 2009.

Kashmiri, was one of the original anti-Soviet jihadis who were trained by the US and the UK and sent into Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Army.

A battle-hardened man, Kashmiri was arrested by Army from Poonch in 1995. However, after spending two years in prison he escaped in a jailbreak and resurfaced in Pakistan.

In September 2009, it was reported that a US drone attack killed him. The truth was revealed some twenty days later that he had survived the attack.

The other time he escaped death was in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Kashmiri, a mine expert, was grievously injured in a blast and lost an eye and a finger. Once the Afghan war got over in 1989, he directed his energies towards Kashmir and joined the Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami in 1991. After a few years, he developed some differences with the then head of HuJI, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, and formed his own breakaway group the 313 Brigade. Kashmiri even 'survived' after being arrested by Pakistan in 2003 for his alleged role in an attempt to assassinate the then Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan Army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani.

Washington, June 4
Several terrorists charged by India with mass killings on its soil have been living in Pakistan, an eminent American think tank has said, noting that the US has not yet made it a priority to hold Islamabad to account for the infiltration of militants across the border.

“Indians have been watching the Pakistan Army send armed young men with groups like the LeT across that border with impunity for years, and the US has not made it a priority of holding Pakistan to account for the rates of infiltration,” said Steve Coll, president and CEO of New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.

“It would be unreasonable to say you should have zero infiltrations into complex territory, big mountains, but the rates of infiltration that Pakistan has allowed suggest the state policy,” he said. It is important for Americans to understand that the ambiguity in the nature of the haven that Osama bin Laden found in Pakistan is not, by itself, unusual in the country, Coll said. — PTI