A man claims that the day before the Pahalgam attack, a terror suspect spoke to him: "Hindu ho kya?"

A man from Jalna, Maharashtra, who just got back from Jammu and Kashmir, said he had a conversation with one of the alleged perpetrators of the Pahalgam terror massacre the day before it happened. "Hindu ho kya. Recalling his encounter with a man at a food booth in the Baisaran Valley on April 21, Adarsh Raut told PTI, "You don't look like you are from Kashmir." On April 21, Raut told PTI, he had gone horseback riding in Pahalgam and had stopped for supper at a "Maggi stall" when a man asked him whether he was Hindu.

Additionally, he told Raut that he didn't appear to be a Kashmiri. "There's a smaller crowd today," Raut observed, as the suspect turned to face his buddy. The inhabitant of Jalna claimed that although he found the chat rather unsettling, he did not fully understand its implications until the next day, when 26 people—mostly tourists—were killed by terrorists in the same place. He asserted, "I made the connection after I saw the sketches made public by the National Investigation Agency." Raut claimed to have sent a thorough report on his experiences in Kashmir to the NIA via email.

"I wrote down everything I could recall." I also complained that network problems prevented me from paying the Maggi booth owner at first. When I got down from the slope, I paid him using his phone number," he stated. Raut stated that he had not heard back from the NIA. "If they get in touch with me, I'll help them out in any way I can," he told PTI.