Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayiba on Sunday claimed responsibility for the abortive attempt on the life of Jammu and Kashmir Finance Minister Muzaffar Hussain Baig in Baramulla town in north Kashmir.
"Baig is on the hit list of the LeT. We carried out Saturday's attack at Azad Gunj," a LeT spokesman Abu Umer told a Baramulla-based news agency.
Security around Baig was upgraded to the Z-Plus category following the attack and after intelligence agencies received specific inputs that Pakistan's ISI and Lashkar-e-Tayiba were planning to eliminate him.
A former vice-president of the People's Conference, a constituent of the Hurriyat Conference, from 1980-84, Baig has been a prime target for militants as he has been on the forefront of discrediting the Hurriyat Conference and militant groups.
The first warning came in November last year after he visited Ghulam Mohi-ud-din Lone, brother of slain former National Conference minister Mushtaq Lone.
Immediately after this, he had received a telephone call from a militant outfit, Al-Nasreen, a shadow group of the LeT, asking him to desist from making statements against militants and visiting families whose members had been gunned down by militants.
