Karachi: Mistry Zahoor Ibrahim, the Indian Airlines IC 814 hijacker, was shot dead on March 1 in Akhtar Colony in Karachi in Pakistan, reports said. Mistry was living in Karachi under the new identity of Zahid Akhund. He owned the furniture store Crescent Furniture that was located in Karachi.
With the killing of Ibrahim, only two out of five Jaish-e-Mohammed hijackers are alive in Pakistan including Ibrahim Azhar, elder brother of Masood Azhar and Rauf Asghar, the two king-pins of the globally designated terrorist group.
Twenty five year old Rupin Katyal was brutally murdered by Zahoor Mistry on December 25, 1999 using a sharp instrument and his body was retrieved from the hijacked plane in UAE. He along with his wife were returning to Delhi after honeymoon in Kathmandu on that fateful day.
According to counter-terrorism experts, only Ibrahim Azhar and Shahid Akhtar Sayed are alive in Pakistan with the latter moving away from Karachi to relative protection of lawless Khyber Paktunkhwa area of Pakistan. It is understood that while one of the hijackers died due to natural causes, another was killed by Indian security forces during the December 13, 2001, attack on Parliament by the same Sunni jihadist group with Deobandi ideology.
It is understood that the funeral of Zahoor Mistry was attended by senior leaders of JeM group, which is headquartered in Bahawalpur in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Masood Azhar, Omar Saeed Shekh, both then affiliated to Harkat-ul-Ansar group, and a Kashmiri terrorist Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, were released by the Indian government on December 31, 1999, in Kandahar under the watch of the then Taliban terror regime. After being released, Azhar met then Taliban chief Mullah Omar and then crossed over to Pakistan via Spin Boldak crossing in Quetta.
