LeT offshoot TRF retracts Pahalgam attack claim, blames ‘hacking’ for earlier statement

TRF denial over Pahalgam attack comes four days after initial claim and just hours after Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said LeT was extinct and denied having heard of TRF.

TRF had earlier claimed responsibility for Pahalgam terror attack | Representational image | ANI

Srinagar: Facing the heat since the deadly Pahalgam terror attack, The Resistance Front (TRF), an offshoot of the Pakistan-based LeT, has distanced itself from the massacre saying its social media post claiming responsibility for the attack was a “result of a coordinated cyber intrusion”.

In a new statement posted on its social media handles, TRF said Friday night it “unequivocally” denies its “involvement in the Pahalgam incident”.

It claimed that any attribution of the attack to the TRF was false.

On its earlier claim, the statement said that “shortly after the attack in Pahalgam, a brief and unauthorised message was posted from one of our digital platforms”.

The LeT offshoot now claims that after an “internal audit”, they have reasons to believe that it was the result of a “coordinated cyber intrusion,” which they blamed on Indian agencies. This is the first time that the TRF has withdrawn its claim over a terror attack.

Incidentally, their denial came just hours after Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif denied Pakistan’s involvement in the attack, suggesting instead that the incident was orchestrated by India to stoke regional tensions. His argument was that there is nothing called the TRF and that the LeT was extinct.

“…The group they name doesn’t even exist here. Lashkar-e-Taiba is extinct. If the parent doesn’t exist, how can the offshoot take birth here?” he told Yalda Hakim of Sky News in an interview Thursday.

Sources in the Indian security agencies laughed off the fresh claims by TRF and said it clearly shows Pakistan is under pressure, not just from the international community but also because of the strong condemnation of the Pahalgam attack by Kashmiris themselves.

They said the TRF is also clearly under pressure from the ISI and they are now trying to distance themselves.

They added that this also means that the body camera footage shot by the terrorists will not be revealed and Pakistan will continue to blame this on India and local insurgents.
ThePrint was the first to report that a group of four LeT terrorists, including two locals and two Pakistani terrorists, wearing body cameras, had killed 25 tourist and one local Kashmiri.

(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)