New Delhi: India has repeatedly named Shahzad Bhatti in investigations into attacks in Punjab and Haryana.
On Monday (August 17), Union Home Minister Amit Shah claimed that security agencies had dismantled an ISI-backed “Shahzad Bhatti Network” in coordinated operations across 14 states and arrested more than 200 people.
In July, the NIA filed a chargesheet against eight people, including Bhatti, in the Ambala police station car-bomb case. The agency has also accused him of masterminding explosions at a women’s police station in Sirsa, Haryana, in November 2025 and at Baldev Nagar police station in Ambala in January 2026.
Bhatti had built a local network in India and assigned recruits tasks including arranging explosives and providing logistical support for attacks on police facilities, according to the agency. “They arrest somebody else’s servants and put my name on them, saying that so many of Shahzad Bhatti’s servants have been arrested,” he said, demanding evidence to establish any association between the accused and him.
He has also appeared in photographs and videos with Farukh Imtiaz Khokhar, a leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F), whose family is influential in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Khokhar was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Rawalpindi court on July 14, 2026, along with two other accused, in the Majid Satti murder case.
On June 9, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) said it had conducted coordinated searches at 18 locations across nine districts in Punjab and Haryana as part of three cases involving an alleged criminal-militant network associated with Bhatti.
However, the name Bhatti had appeared in investigations well before the minister’s statement.
