JeM Commander Claims Pakistan Army Honoured Slain Terrorists with Military Protocol After Indian Strikes
Ilyas Kashmiri also acknowledged that Masood Azhar was directly involved in orchestrating terror attacks on Indian soil, including those in Delhi and Mumbai.
A new video of Jaish-e-Muhammed (JeM) commander Masood Ilyas Kashmiri has surfaced online, in which he claims that Pakistan Army Chief General Asim Munir instructed top military officials to attend the funerals of terrorists killed during India’s Operation Sindoor.
In the clip, Kashmiri says that Pakistan’s Army General Headquarters (GHQ) ordered senior officers to treat the slain terrorists as martyrs, with full military honours. “GHQ directed that the martyrs be honoured with the last salute and ordered corps commanders to attend the janaza (funeral) in uniform and stand guard,” he says in the video.
Another video, apparently from the same event, features Kashmiri confirming the direct involvement of JeM founder Maulana Masood Azhar in terror attacks in India, including in Delhi and Mumbai.
Speaking in Urdu, he says:
“After escaping from Delhi’s Tihar Jail and slipping out of enemy hands, when Amir-ul-Mujahideen Maulana Masood Azhar returned to Pakistan, it was the soil of Balakot that gave him the strength to continue his mission in Delhi and Mumbai. Every grain of this soil owes itself to him.”
The remarks come shortly after another leaked video where Kashmiri admitted that Indian military strikes under Operation Sindoor devastated Azhar’s family in Bahawalpur.
“Embracing terrorism, we fought against Delhi, Kabul and Kandahar to protect this country’s borders. On May 7, Indian forces tore apart Maulana Masood Azhar's family in Bahawalpur,” he says.
Operation Sindoor: India's Coordinated Retaliation
Operation Sindoor was India’s response to the deadly April 22 terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam, which claimed the lives of 26 civilians, most of them tourists.
In a high-level overnight operation, the Indian Army, Air Force, and Navy conducted precision strikes on nine terrorist hideouts across Pakistan, including in Bahawalpur, Kotli, and Muridke. The targets were known hubs of terror outfits like JeM, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and Hizbul Mujahideen.
Following the strikes, Indian Army officer Colonel Sofiya Qureshi confirmed that the operations were executed with surgical precision, ensuring there were no civilian casualties. While Pakistan reported 26 deaths and 46 injuries, it did not acknowledge that the sites hit were terrorist infrastructure.