Indian Defence Review

Courtesy: www.indianexpress.com

The following comment has been received from the reader (author) on facebook page of Indian Defence Review on the article Indo-Pak Relation post Pathankot Terror Attack – a personal perspective, which raises many questions that needs answer for the recent terrorist attack at Pathankot:-

Two related incidents, hijacking of the Gurdaspur SP’s vehicle along with him by terrorists and the subsequent attack on the Pathankot Air Force Base, suspected to be by the same terrorists, raise some disturbing questions. I will list those out below. Do take note that this is based on the FACTS distilled out of the various ‘versions’ reported in the media. 

1. Why was the SP of a sensitive border district like Gurdaspur, where terrorists had struck a police station barely 6 months ago, out at night without his security detail in another neighboring district?  

2. The vehicle he claimed to have been hijacked with, a Mahindra XUV 500 was not exactly an unmarked private car. It had the blue VIP/Police beacon on top. Terrorists were most likely to have had some idea of the utility of a vehicle with a blue beacon on top. 

3. There is absolutely no clarity on how exactly did the terrorists stop the vehicle and hijack it, along with the SP, Salwinde Singh, his friend Rajesh Verma and their cook?  

4. The claim that the terrorists let the SP, Salwinder Singh and his cook off because they were ‘unaware’ he was the SP can fool only the gullible. It defies credulity that terrorists would let off anyone who could sound the alert and give away their presence and location, thus jeopardizing their mission. If they had to get rid of him and the cook, they would have simply killed both. For terrorists on a suicide mission, it doesn’t matter that they had killed someone just to get rid of excess baggage. If the SP claims that he got away pretending to be a civilian, he is lying. They did not let his friend Verma off. 

5. Apparently, only later did they got to know from Verma that they had let off a SP and then they decided to kill Verma. He apparently pretended to be dead and escaped. How cock and bull can this story get? The same terrorists, who had hijacked an Innova before that, had brutally killed its driver so as to prevent him from raising an alarm. But the same terrorists became so incompetent that they let off the SP and the cook and later carried out an execution so inept that this Verma survived without an injury? Really? 

6. There were initial reports in the media that intelligence agencies had intercepted calls by the terrorists to their handlers in Pakistan and one apparently had even called his mother revealing that they were on a suicide mission. Now the story is that it was actually Verma who has told this to the police because the terrorists had made those calls from his mobile while driving him around. Nice, isn’t it? That the terrorists had no means of communication with their handlers or relatives and that those in Pakistan would pick up a call made from an unknown Indian number defies credulity.  

The XUV500 belonging to the SP, Gurdaspur, with the blue police beacon was found abandoned barely 500 mtrs from the area in Pathankot Air Force Base where the terrorist attack took place. It is believed that the terrorists had crossed several check points without a hindrance because if the blue beacon on the vehicle. 

If I was the NSA, I would have directed the Gurdaspur SP, his cook, and friend Rajesh Verma to be taken into custody immediately and subjected them to rigorous interrogation as well as checked all their call details records going back over months. 

My gut feeling is that the Pathankot Attack was far more sinister and there is much more to it than meets the eye. 

7. At about 7:30 hrs this morning, long after the government had claimed that all the terrorists had been neutralized, Lt. Col Niranjan Kumar and 3 soldiers of NSG were killed in an blast from an IED that the terrorists had left there (probably booby trapped). Question arises, where did they get all this time if they had been detected while breaching the first security perimeter? 

[19:23, 04/01/2016] *: How did the SP LIVE? Why not ask IG, Gurdaspur? Why not ask DGP, Punjab? This question is not connected with the operations going on. In any case, army cannot answer this question. The question is, how did the SP escape? Why did he not fight the terrorists and die? Is his life more precious? What about his oath to the constitution of India? Why should the armed forces be the only guys to take their oath seriously and keep dying for the country? Are the IPS officers exempted from their own oath to protect India? These are serious questions which every citizen of India should be asking. Are armed forces supposed to die so that corrupt police officers can live? What about our families?