New Delhi: Five years after the Computerised National Identity Card of Pakistani national Afeera Bibi first surfaced amid the probe of the 2019 Pulwama attack, the card is back in circulation in media reports and on social media platforms in the wake of the 10 November Red Fort blast in Delhi.
Reported to be the wife of Pulwama attack mastermind Muhammad Umar Farooq back in 2020, Afeera Bibi has now been falsely identified as the wife of the Red Fort bomber, Dr Umar un Nabi. The 36-year-old doctor, who was driving the white i20 that exploded near the Red Fort metro station on 10 November, was unmarried, sources have confirmed to ThePrint.
Umar Farooq, nephew of Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar, was killed in an encounter in 2021, two years after the Pulwama attack, in which 40 CRPF personnel had died.
The viral Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC) of Afeera Bibi, originally circulated in 2020, identifies her as a Pakistani national and the wife of ‘Muhammad Umar’.
However, according to media reports, investigators probing the Jaish-e-Mohammed connection in the Red Fort blast and the Faridabad explosives haul have allegedly found that she may be a key figure in the terror outfit’s women’s brigade, Jamaat-ul-Mominat.
Report say Afeera Bibi allegedly worked with Sadia Azhar, Masood Azhar’s younger sister, and both were in contact with Shaheen Saeed, one of the doctors arrested for alleged involvement in the Faridabad terror module, which was behind the Delhi blast. Shaheen, a senior doctor at Faridabad’s Al-Falah University, was arrested after assault rifles and other ammunition were recovered from her car during J&K Police raids in Haryana.
The blast is now also being probed by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) as a terror attack. The Red Fort blast on 10 November left 13 dead and several injured. The police have arrested 15 individuals and detained three others so far in connection with the terror module involving doctors.
Besides Umar un Nabi and Shaheen Saeed, the accused doctors include Ahmad Rather, his pediatrician brother Muzaffar, and Muzammil Ahmad Gani. All are suspected to have links to Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind (AGuH).
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)