Over 80 FIRs, 200 arrests against Shahzad Bhatti Network; Here's how Pakistan's spy agency rented terror in India

 

Strip away the branded name and the SBN fits a pattern that is by now depressingly familiar. According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, it is a Pakistan-based syndicate that the ISI uses to run grenade attacks, Improvised Explosive Device (IED) blasts, petrol-bomb strikes and targeted killings inside India. It does not fight in the open. Instead, it pays local men, small-time criminals, cash-strapped youths, the desperate and the greedy to do the dirty work. Scout a target, film a police compound, stash a weapons consignment, pull a trigger. The handlers sit safely across the border. The recruits, and the risk, are Indian.

 

 

 

The single most damning detail from the recoveries is small and easy to miss. Several grenades seized during the operation carried the stamp of the Pakistan Ordnance Factory (POF), the Pakistani state's own weapons manufacturer. A grenade doesn't wander across an international border on its own. That marking is a fingerprint, and it points straight back to Rawalpindi.

 

 

To understand the SBN, it helps to understand the machine behind it. The Pakistani scholar Ayesha Siddiqa, who earned her doctorate in war studies at King's College London and wrote the landmark book Military Inc., has spent decades documenting how deeply Pakistan's army is fused with its economy and its militant proxies. Her work describes an establishment in which armed groups are not rogue actors the state struggles to control, but tools the state assigns political and strategic roles. The ISI's logic is cold and deliberate. Keep India bleeding through countless small wounds, while keeping Pakistan's own hands clean enough to deny everything.

 

 

This is not a fringe view held only in New Delhi. Husain Haqqani, once Pakistan's own ambassador to the United States and now at the Hudson Institute in Washington, has written bluntly about how Pakistan's establishment has long protected UN-designated groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed rather than dismantle them. The Cato Institute, an American think tank not known for pro-India sympathies, has described Pakistan's "double game", publicly cooperating against terror while quietly sustaining militant networks, as conventional wisdom in Washington, one that correctly ties militant sponsorship to the country's military and intelligence services.

 

The Shahzad Bhatti Network (SBN), then, is not an aberration. It is one more disposable brand in a business model.

 

 

The reason these networks keep reappearing is that Pakistan has never truly shut off the money and the weapons. In July 2025, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global watchdog on terror financing, for the first time devoted a section of its report to state-sponsored terrorism, naming Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed as beneficiaries of state support. It stopped short of naming Pakistan outright, but the meaning was unmistakable. Pakistan has already spent years on the FATF "grey list", twice, in fact and only wriggled off after promising crackdowns. Haqqani himself has warned that Islamabad could land back on that list the moment the world notices its jihadi groups stirring again.

 

 

The grenade markings tell the same story on the ground that the FATF tells on paper. This is not the first POF-stamped ordnance to surface in India. Through 2025 and 2026, Punjab Police repeatedly seized Pakistan Ordnance Factory grenades from ISI-linked modules. In May 2026, Delhi Police recovered four POF-made grenades and 25 matching cartridges from a module tying the ISI to underworld networks. The SBN sweep is the latest chapter in a long, documented series.

 

 

Drawing from the Ministry of Home Affairs, the network's activities inside India include:

The arrests were booked under India's toughest laws, including the anti-terror UAPA, the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Arms Act, the NDPS Act and the Explosive Substances Act.

 

 

India's response was fast, coordinated and pre-emptive; the network was broken before it could strike, not mourned after. That is the shift Delhi wants the world to register, a zero-tolerance posture that treats cross-border terror as a national-security emergency rather than a diplomatic irritant. But the deeper lesson is the one the Pakistan Ordinance Factory (POF) stamp keeps hammering home. As long as a state-owned factory's grenades keep turning up in Indian fields, the "network" being dismantled is only ever the outermost layer. The machine that builds them sits across the border and, as scholars from Islamabad to Washington keep pointing out, it has never been switched off.