LUCKNOW: A suspected militant’s body was recovered after an anti-terror operation that lasted nearly 12 hours on the outskirts of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, police said early on Wednesday.
ADG Daljit Chaudhary said earlier reports of two militants, who were allegedly linked to a blast in a Bhopal-Ujjain passenger train on Tuesday holed up in the house were false.
“The suspect was found dead with weapons inside the house. During the operation, it was felt at one point of time that there was more than one person, but it is confirmed that there was only one man.
The operation stands closed and now the rest of the legal formalities will take place,” Chaudhary said, adding that the encounter ended around 3 am on Wednesday.
Uttar Pradesh anti-terror squad (ATS) inspector general Aseem Arun said the militant was a member of the Indian module of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group called Khorasan.
“We got the intelligence from a sister agency that a person named Saifullah affiliated to IS is hiding in a residential area in Lucknow,” Arun said. Ammunition, including eight automatic pistols, live cartridges and some explosives, and an IS flag were recovered from the site of the encounter.
The ATS reached the cleric’s house in a thickly populated locality on the outskirts of Lucknow around 2 pm after specific inputs about militants linked to the Madhya Pradesh train blast.
