Pervez Musharraf, former army chief and the then Pakistani president, once awarded Ilyas Kashmiri, a militant commander, for "slitting the throat" of an Indian army officer in 2000, media reports say.
Kashmiri, the blue-eyed boy of Musharraf, was a commander of the Harkat-ul-Jehad al-Islami (HuJI) before he was reportedly killed in a drone attack in North Waziristan last week.
Besides serving in the elite Special Service Group, a commando unit of the Pakistan army, Kashmiri, who hailed from the Kotli area in Pakistan occupied Kashmir and fought in Jammu and Kashmir in the 1990s, was deputed by the military to train Afghan mujahideen fighting the Russian army in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s.
On February 26, 2000 he reportedly conducted a guerrilla operation against the Indian army in Nakyal sector after crossing the Line of Control (LoC) with 25 militants. He surrounded a bunker and threw grenades inside.
He was able to kidnap an injured Indian officer, whose throat he later slit and presented the head to top army officials, including then army chief General Musharraf, who gave him a cash award of 100,000 Pakistani Rupees.
Pictures of Kashmiri holding the head of the dead officer were published in some Pakistani newspapers and he became very important among militants, the reports said.
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