A former member of Special Service Group, he was credited with masterminding the Angoor Ada operation in 2004, where many Arabs and Chechens based in the tribal areas were killed or arrested and turned over to the Americans.
It was alleged that Ilyas Kashmiri, the chief of Jammu & Kashmir chapter of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami,[4] was behind the murder of Maj-Gen Faisal Alavi at the behest of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan in North Waziristan.
[2] In August 2005, however, he was sacked by General Pervez Musharraf from his post as head of Pakistan's Special Service Group (SSG), for "conduct unbecoming."
Carey Schofield, writing for the British newspaper The Sunday Times, reported that there was a plot by Major General Faisal Alavi's enemies using an affair with a divorced Pakistani woman to discredit him.
[10] On 19 November 2008, while driving to work in his car, he was shot dead by three unknown gunmen on Islamabad Highway near the PWD Colony in the Koral police precincts, close to his home in Bahria Town.
He had threatened to expose Pakistani army generals who he believed had made deals with Taliban militants and warned that he would "furnish all relevant proof.
When he was bluntly asked by an SAS officer why the Pakistani army should be given all this help if nothing came of it in terms of getting the Al-Qaeda leadership, he replied "he knew that Pakistan was not pulling its weight in the war on terror.
[10] The editorial in Daily Times claimed that Maj (Retd) Haroon Ashiq was the assassin of Maj-Gen Faisal Alavi "for Rs 150,000 given him by [Ilyas] Kashmiri."
This was consistent with Interior Minister Rehman Malik's statement on television in August 2009 that "officers of the rank of major" in the intelligence agencies with links with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda had been arrested "because they wanted to target army generals.
Earlier Kashmiri was arrested after the twin attacks on President General Pervez Musharraf in December 2003, but was later released in February 2004 at the insistence of United Jihad Council led by Sayeed Salahudeen.