Al Qaeda affiliate: US offers up to $5m for Ilyas Kashmiri

Kashmiri’s Harakatul Jihad al-Islami is suspected of launching attack on US consulate in Karachi in 2006.

WASHINGTON: US officials on Wednesday offered a reward of up to $5 million for information on Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri, head of a Pakistani militant group linked to al Qaeda and suspected of launching a 2006 suicide attack on the US consulate in Karachi.

The State Department said Kashmiri “is the commander of the terrorist organisation Harakatul Jihad al-Islami (HUJI), which supports al Qaeda” and that the group has led training camps for the launching of several attacks in India and Pakistan.

The group is believed to have ordered the March 2, 2006 suicide bombing at the US consulate in Karachi that killed four people, including US diplomat David Foy, and injured 48 others.

In January 2010, a US federal grand jury indicted Kashmiri for terrorism-related offences in connection with a plot to attack the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Denmark following uproar over blasphemous cartoons.

Last August, Kashmiri was placed on a US list as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” and HUJI was labeled a “Foreign Terrorist Organisation.” HUJI and Kashmiri have also been added to a United Nations blacklist of individuals and entities linked to the al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Kashmiri was born in 1964 in Azad Kashmir. He is approximately six feet tall and weighs about 200 pounds. He has black hair and been seen with a thick beard dyed white, black, or red at various times. He has lost sight in one eye, and often wears aviator-style sunglasses. He is missing an index finger, according to the State Department.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th,  2011.