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In a startling revelation, suicide bombers or "fidayeen" are being given heavy doses of drugs to infuse them with courage and "take away the pain" before launching a terror attack on security forces in Jammu and Kashmir, a US-based newspaper said today.
Quoting a senior State Police Official, the Christian Science Monitor said the well-armed Kashmiri militants, who have a tradition of fighting to death, have taken to smuggling of narcotics to pay for their violent activities.
"The militants get involved in narcotics for two main reasons... One is to give to their fighters during suicide attacks, to give them courage and to take away the pain. The second reason is fundraising. Narcotics are very profitable," said Manzoor Ahmed, the Police Chief of north Kashmir’s Bandipora area.
He said Kashmir’s growing narcotics trade was flourishing in areas where militants are most active. Narco-terrorism is posing serious security dangers in the Kashmir valley, he added.
"The militants get the pure white heroin in Pakistan, where it is cheap, about Rs 3,000 a kilo. And they smuggle it across the Valley, give it to their sympathisers and sell it down in Delhi or Mumbai," Mr Ahmed said.
Army and police officials told the Monitor that there was an enormous increase in the cultivation and transport of narcotics in the State over the past decade.
Quoting officials, it said "most worrisome was that the Kashmiri militant groups may soon have enough funds from narcotics to operate independently of their former patrons, Pakistan, which has officially banned and cut all ties to the 14-year insurgency that has killed hundreds of people so far."
"This is easy money for the militants, and they use it to fund their activities. In addition to that, foreign mercenaries use it," Defence Spokesman in Srinagar Lt Col Mukhtiar Singh told the newspaper.
The officials admitted that they have no way to measure how much opium is coming into the State, since police catch only those consignments about which they have prior information.
But since many of these heroin packs are confiscated in districts along the Line of Control, where opium cultivation is not common, police officials said the evidence points to the heroin being smuggled in from Pakistan.
The officials said many of the packages captured bear the phrase "made in Afghanistan" written in Farsi (Persian).
"It’s a brand name, because the name Afghanistan sells. We don’t know if it actually comes from Afghanistan, but it does come from outside the State, because we catch it in areas where opium is not grown," a senior police official at Baramulla District Headquarters said.
The Monitor said there was reason to believe that some Afghan heroin has been coming to Kashmir, if only because instability and good rains have allowed Afghanistan to retake its position of the world’s number one source of opium.
Kashmir’s close location to Afghanistan and its wide swaths of lawless territory make it an ideal transport route, it added.
But even without an outside source, Kashmir would be awash in narcotics, the newspaper said.
In July, custom agents in the Anantnag district of south Kashmir discovered an astounding 555 acres of opium poppies, with a potential yield of 10,000 Kg of opium, the Monitor said, adding that this amount of raw opium would be worth about 2 million inside Kashmir in international markets, once this is processed into heroin, it would be worth much more.
The raids were all the more surprising, Indian customs agents said, because they had been carried out in Bijbehara, the hometown of Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.
In Srinagar, Customs Chief M S Kamra said the greatest narcotics challenge is not what comes from outside, but what is grown inside Kashmir itself.
With each case, Mr Kamra said he felt that he was getting closer to the nexus of narco-dealers and terrorists.
"In some of the cases, we found
that people who indulge in carrying hashish have gotten in touch with people
who need weapons. They become a link between militants and narcotics,"
he added.
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