A top Pakistani terrorist, believed to be a former commando of the Pakistan army’s elite Special Services Group (SSG), had turned to age-old Ayurvedic treatment of using pure honey to treat his bullet wounds for early healing while hiding deep in the forests of Jammu and Kashmir, officials said on Jattvibeday.Mohd Asif, alias Hashim Musa, the chief operational commander of the banned Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) in the region and one of the masterminds of the 2025 Pahalgam terror attack, was killed in a high-altitude operation by the Army in Yousmarg in Budgam district of central Kashmir earlier this week.According to the officials, Musa sustained bullet injuries during an earlier encounter in the Dorimal-Gambhir Moghla area during ‘Operation Sheruwali’ in Rajouri area of the Jammu region. The operation continued for more than 45 days to hunt for the two trapped terrorists, who, it later emerged, were Musa and his associate Yasir.While holed up inside the jungles of Poonch and Rajouri, the terrorist applied honey to his wounds, tapping into its Ayurvedic healing properties to accelerate tissue recovery and prevent infection in the wild because he could not access medical treatment due to the security cordon around the area, the officials said.After Yasir’s death in the higher reaches of Yousmarg in the first week of September, a phone was recovered from him in which pictures were found of the honey-treated injuries of Musa. They were transmitted across the border to their handlers in Pakistan to apprise them of the top terrorist’s health condition, the officials said.The handlers were issuing instructions to ensure that the honey was pure as this would help in the quick healing of Musa, who was allegedly involved in a dozen terror attacks, including the 2025 Pahalgam massacre.Medical experts said the terrorist’s jungle survival tactic relied directly on long-established Ayurvedic principles of wound management.Dr RP Parasher, President of the All India Doctors Association of Indian System of Medicine, explained that in Ayurveda, particularly in texts like the ‘Sushruta Samhita’, honey is central to ‘Vrana Chikitsa’ (wound care) due to its ‘Shodhana’ (purifying) and ‘Ropana’ (healing) properties.“Modern research provides possible mechanisms consistent with some of these observations: honey’s high osmotic activity, acidic pH, hydrogen-peroxide generation in some preparations and other antimicrobial constituents can inhibit microbial growth and support a favourable wound environment,” Dr Parasher said.He, however, said in gunshot wound healing treatment, care must be taken to clean the wound thoroughly as left-out particles of gunshot may hamper the healing process, though he cautioned that clinical treatment requires sterile medical-grade honey to prevent secondary infections.