PART TWO

Probing Pathankot Attack: All Alert, All Caught Unawares — Luck their Strongest Ally

Long after the fighting, a fire continued to rage across the Airmen’s Mess and the pile of discarded furniture in the yard outside. The last terrorists inside the Air Force base in Pathankot had held out since early on Sunday morning, January 3, firing from inside the building and a nearby patch of elephant grass. The Airmen’s Mess was where they were killed, set alight by explosives and gunfire from armoured personnel carriers. As the National Investigation Agency sifts through the detritus of the battle, there’s a strange fact facing them.

Four bodies of terrorists have been handed over, clad in military fatigues, and explosives strapped to their bodies. There are four recovered assault rifles and four pistols — the standard kit of the fidayeen, along with ready-to-eat chicken and rice, painkillers, and vials of perfume. Just four.

“It is possible that two more bodies were blown to pieces, as the Airmen’s Mess disintegrated,” an intelligence officer familiar with the case told The Indian Express, “and we have sent forensic samples for examination. The thing is, we would have expected to find their weapons in the debris, and nothing’s surfaced”.

The unresolved issue of just how many terrorists attacked the base is emblematic of the growing questions over just how well-organised operations to eliminate them were.

Intelligence Bureau agents have even, government sources say, been able to identify, with a high degree of confidence, the men who sent them to their death. The Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar, his key aide Maulana Ashfaq Ahmad, Hafiz Abdul Shakoor and Kasim Jan: these men, they say, spoke to the terrorists in intercepted phone conversations.

Everything that transpired once the firing began, though, is lost in the haze of battle. That, in turn, The Indian Express investigation shows, points to worrying signs that the outcome of the operation was as much good luck as good management.

January 2, 3.30 am: First fire

Ever since 10.10 pm, the airbase was preparing for battle: the first team of National Security Guards landed there then, to be followed, a few hours later, by a second one, standing by if the terrorists ended up taking hostages from the more than 10,000 members of military families living there. Two teams of the Indian army’s crack special forces were stationed at the Mamoon Army base next door, along with six mine-protected vehicles. Everyone braced for an attack on the Air Base, or another military facility.

Inside the Defence Security Corps’ mess, a few hundred meters from the building where the NSG was waiting, Jagdish Chand was brewing tea for the guards who would soon be ending their shift at the base’s perimeter wall. Fifty-eight-year-old Chand, a cook, had just been transferred to Pathankot from Leh, arriving a day earlier.

Drawn from retired soldiers, typically in their late 40s or early 50s, the DSC is responsible for security duties at many defence installations across the country.

The cook, officials involved the operation have told the NIA, likely looked up when he heard gunfire outside — and then, perhaps, saw a man with a gun running into the mess kitchen. The terrorist was shot dead, perhaps after Chand fought him to the ground, before being killed by a second attacker.

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Even though the base was prepared for a classic fidayeen attack on its gates — men, armed with grenades and assault rifles, trying to shoot their way on the technical area tarmac — no one had expected they were already inside.

Located by thermal-imaging equipment on board Air Force helicopters, the terrorists had moved rapidly after jumping the 11-foot wall around the base. They first faced a patrol of Garud commandos from a contingent of 24 men who had come in the night before with the Commander-in-chief of the Western Air Command, Air Marshal S B Deo.

The Garuds, the Air Force’s in-house commando force, opened fire near the military engineering service’s mechanical transport facility, and claim to have injured one terrorist standing near the perimeter wall. In the exchange of fire, Garud Corporal Gursewak Singh was shot dead.

Following this exchange of fire, the terrorists ran into the DSC mess. It was then that they killed the cook, Chand.

Subsequently, Kulwant Singh, an unarmed guard, tried to grapple with one of the terrorists, but was shot and killed in the unequal struggle. Three other DSC guards were killed, claimed by a grenade the terrorists threw as they ran into the building.

Large swathes of the airbase, home to families and unarmed personnel, had been left unguarded, simply because no one thought the terrorists would be able to penetrate the perimeter with such ease.

The Army says, in private, that it had thousands of armed personnel available who could have been drafted in to secure the premises — men who would, moreover, have then been available to lock down the base once the firing began. No one, though, had ever planned or prepared for such an assault, a mistake that had cost five men their lives.

4.00 am: Hide and Seek

THE National Security Guard joined battle, sources familiar with the operation say, inside minutes. They first engaged the terrorists near the base’s bakery, known to generations of military families in Pathankot for its cookies and cakes. The terrorists, though, melded away just as contact began. This began a lethal game of hide and seek, with forces trying to pin down the terrorists and force them to expend their ammunition — and the terrorists darting away, to avoid just that outcome.

For the NSG and the small Army Special Force contingent, the first task now was to ensure the the terrorists didn’t make their way north, towards the Air Base’s family housing, or south and south-east, where combat jets, helicopters and air-defence missile batteries were housed. The gates to the hangers were less than 500 m away.

Inside hours, both the terrorists who had stormed the DSC mess were dead. “We were pretty sure that they had not infiltrated the technical area”, an Air Force officer said, “because if they had they’d have been blowing up aircraft by then”.

Fighting broke out again at around 10.00 a.m., after more terrorists were spotted near the Airmen’s billet-the third point of contact. The army’s special forces, reinforced by several more columns who had been called in once the fighting broke out, had located the group.

“We did the search but once contact was made, we were told to hand over to the NSG”, said a military official present at the base. The official said that though this was done as seamlessly as possible, it slowed operations down, as the terrain and location of the terrorists had to be explained to the NSG’s officers.

The fighting dragged on. At one stage, the forces contemplated bringing down the airmen’s billet, using explosives. The option, though, was rejected after it turned out there were still airmen trapped inside. In the afternoon, the Army had covered the evacuation of the Air Force personnel inside, firing from a BMP2 armoured personnel carrier, and a Casspir mine-proof vehicle. Soon afterwards, explosives tore the building apart.

Late that afternoon, the Air Force Flew Mi-35 attack helicopters low over the base, their armour-plating protecting them from fire, to make sure all was well. Two more terrorists were detected at 3.30 pm, near a patch of elephant grass. The men were engaged, once again — and killed.

Even though the army has said, in public, that there was “excellent synergy” between the multiple forces involved in the operation, and that the decision was taken after consulting the Army chief, private assessments by serving officers are less emphatic.

“The NSG has never been trained to go after terrorists inside the semi-rural setting of a large military camp”, one officer said. “We do it all the time in Kashmir. Last year, we did an operation in Arnia. Five terrorists had were detected inside the the camp around 3 am, and by 10.30 am it was all over”.

In fairness, it had taken just three and a half hours longer for the Pathankot operation to come to an end — and that over considerably greater terrain. Bar the NSG’s Lieutenant-Colonel Niranjan Kumar, who died when he moved a body under which the terrorist had left a grenade as a booby trap, there were no fatalities after the initial contact.

3.00 pm, January 4: Recrimination

Eighty four hours after it began, late on Tuesday afternoon, Defence Minister Manohar Parikkar was finally able to address the press. Behind the scenes, though, the recrimination had begun. The Air Force was less than happy that the seniormost officer at the base, Air Marshal Deo, had no role in operations. Brigadier G S Belvi, in charge of the army contingent, only had to defer to a military colleague, Major-General Dushyant Singh

— but it still ruffled military feathers since his boss, the Director-General of the NSG, is a police officer.

The essence of the Army’s critique is that there was no reason why, with nearly 15,000 troops present just around the Air Base, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval had to call in the NSG. Like all hindsight, this criticism seems fair because the hunt went on for so long — but had hostages been taken, the failure to have the NSG on hand would also have been an issue.

Far more important are the larger lessons. Had the Intelligence Bureau not intercepted telephone conversations by the terrorists, and set off the alarm, it is possible the terrorists would have managed to enter deeper into the base, hit aircraft, unchallenged, or inflict heavier casualties.

There has been no explanation of just why a vital base didn’t have better perimeter security, and electronic surveillance systems, even though similar attacks on bases just across the border in Pakistan had lead to the losses of multi-million dollar combat assets.

Had a proper lockdown system been planned and rehearsed, moreover, the lethal hide and seek at the base wouldn’t have gone on for quite so long. In this sense, it’s clear military planners didn’t learn important lessons from 26/11, where forces had to respond on the fly — with far from optimal consequences. Pathankot was an embarrassment, not a 26/11-type catastrophe, as some have claimed. It could, only too easily, have proved otherwise.

(Tomorrow: Meanwhile, in Delhi)

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VIDEO: No action, no talks: Pathankot test for PM Modi's Pakistan policy?

Video player from: NDTV (Privacy Policy)

SLIDESHOW: Pathankot Air Force base attacked!

1/19 SLIDES © AP

An Indian army soldier is seen during a search operation in a forest area outside the Pathankot air force base on Sunday.

PART ONE

SOURCE:
http://www.msn.com/en-in/news/national/probing-pathankot-attack-fence-floodlights-that-didn%E2%80%99t-work-gaps-in-border-patrol-patchy-police-response/ar-AAgrPWm?li=AAggbRN&ocid=UP21DHP

Probing Pathankot Attack: Fence Floodlights That didn’t work, Gaps in Border Patrol,
Patchy Police Response

The only fact that truly mattered hung off the wall, swinging slightly in the morning breeze, when investigators discovered it yesterday. It was a nylon rope, looped from the ground up over the Pathankot Air Force Base’s 11-foot-high perimeter wall and then down again. Little genius had been needed to pull off the feat: one member of the assault team had climbed up one of the eucalyptus trees growing along the fence, and bent it over with his weight on to the wall. Helping them was the dark — the floodlights in that stretch of the wall were not working that night.

Hundreds of Defence Security Corps guards tasked with guarding that fence, the last line of defence for one of India’s most vital forward bases, had failed to notice as the assault team lugged themselves, 50 kg of ammunition, 30 kg of grenades, and their assault weapons.

The ease with which terrorists penetrated the base, an investigation by The Indian Express has found, was just one of many factors which facilitated the strike — leading to a three-day fire engagement that has set off a political storm as well.

Criticism about the time it took to end the operation misses the point. Forces elsewhere in the world have taken longer to terminate operations in smaller areas. The losses of Indian security force personnel, though tragic, are far from the highest India has suffered in similar strikes. However, an investigation by The Indian Express including interviews with eyewitnesses, several key police, military, intelligence and government officials in New Delhi, Chandigarh and Pathankot and those involved in several aspects of the operations, points, instead, to glaring gaps in planning, command, training and equipment.

8 pm, December 31: The prelude

This is known: no one paid much attention when taxidriver Ikagar Singh started up his Innova and drove out of the yard in front of his home in the village of Bhagwal (35 km from the airbase) at around 8 pm on New Year’s Eve. There wasn’t any reason to. He was barely 5 km away from the India-Pakistan border, as the crow flies. And Ikagar told his relatives he had got a call from a family that wanted to rush a patient to a hospital. That family has since denied that they called. To the west of the village, a tributary of the Ravi slices through the border, creating a kilometre-wide gap in the fencing that runs all the way from the Rann of Kutch to Kashmir.

For decades, smugglers, and the then Khalistan terrorists, used these ravines and elephant grass-covered marshes to infiltrate into India from Pakistan. They still do. Last year, the terrorists who attacked Dinanagar used just this route.

Police sources said Ikagar made a call to Harjinder Kaur, a woman relative in Janial village 8 km away, to tell her that he was on his way. The woman says the call came at 9.31 pm. “Later when I called his number, the phone rang twice but was not answered,” Kaur told The Indian Express.

It’s shortly after this, police suspect, that Ikagar was waylaid by terrorists between Bhagwal and Janial. His body would be found at 11 am the next day, hours after the taxidriver had bled to death, his throat slit.

Police investigators, as well as the intelligence services, believe the terror squad likely crossed the border through the marshes west of Bhagwal. The Border Security Force denies this, noting that there’s no video footage of an infiltrating group, nor a cut in the border fence. But that was true of the Dinanagar attack, too — because there is no fencing in the stretch given the terrain.

Says Gurbachan Jagat, a former Director-General of the Border Security Force who was closely involved in the border fencing project. “It’s true the rivers are hard to fence but there are other solutions, like nets across the river, technical surveillance, and, most importantly, moving troops from less vulnerable stretches to more vulnerable ones”. The BSF complains it doesn’t have enough personnel to fix the problem. Each BSF battalion in Punjab, a senior officer told The Indian Express, guards 34 km of the border. In Jammu, where the border is also fully fenced, a battalion protects just 21 km. Last year, after the Dinanagar attack, Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal wrote to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, asking for force levels to be increased. That still hasn’t been done.

As much as 462 km of Punjab’s 553 km of border with Pakistan is fenced, and protected with electrified wire, sensors and floodlights, according to Home Ministry data. It’s the other 91 kilometres for which a problem should have been found by the BSF, and the MHA, to which it reports.

Police investigators have found Ikagar Singh’s mobile received one phone call from Pakistan, and made eight to numbers Indian intelligence services say are linked to top Jaish-e-Muhammad commanders in Bahawalpur. The phone calls led to speculation that he may have been linked to narcotics traffickers based across the border.

He was, it is now clear, the first victim of the Pathankot attack and his killing points to the first in the long series of security failings which facilitated the strike.

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11:30 pm: The kidnappings

It was at 3:23 am on New Year’s Day that Punjab Police learned it had a problem — although it would be a while until it realised just how serious that problem was. Just an hour short of the old year’s midnight, four, perhaps five men in combat fatigues — eyewitness testimony varies — stopped a Mahindra XUV jeep at Kolian village (24 km from the airbase) carrying Superintendent of Police Salwinder Singh, his jeweller friend Rajesh Verma, and Salwinder’s cook, Gopal Das. The terrorists offload the SP and Gopal, tie theior hands, and take off in the vehicle with Verma.

At 2.30 am, Salwinder Singh called SSP Gurdaspur G S Toor using the phone of a villager in Simbli close to where he was dumped. His claim was treated with skepticism. “Are you coming from a party”, Toor is said to have asked and then told him to call the control room. His calls, though, led the Pathankot police control room to use a special code to wake up the district’s Senior Superintendent of Police, R K Bakshi.

Patrols were now asked to start hunting for the hijacked vehicle. “By 3.30 AM, the red alert had been sounded”, an official said. “By 3.35 AM, nakabandi (barricading) had been ordered” an official said.

Soldiers keep vigil at the IAF base in Pathankot on Wednesday. (Source: PTI)

It wasn’t until 7 am, though, that the Mahindra XUV was finally tracked down, just outside the Air Force Base in Pathankot. The injured Verma was found just a short while earlier. Ikagar Singh’s Innova, and his body, were only found at 11 am.

Why did the hunt — which could have confirmed the seriousness of the threat — take so long? One answer lies, police officials claim, in a financial constraint so severe that rural police stations have been left, on an average, with a maximum of two functioning vehicles for their jurisdictions, and lacking fuel for more than a few hours of running each day. Night patrolling has had to be terminated, a top Punjab Police officer said.

It was only at around 9 am, thus, that the seriousness of the situation fully sank in: Until then, the police had treated the kidnapping as just another crime, which given the resources they have did not mean a great deal was done.

These early reports were sent to New Delhi by the Intelligence Bureau’s Amritsar station, whose Deputy Director, according to MHA officials, became increasingly agitated as the morning wore on. His concerns were fuelled by worries in the police that military facilities in the Amritsar area might just be the target of an attack.

Suresh Arora, a veteran of Punjab’s long fight against terrorism who serves as Punjab’s Director-General of Police, called top officers into meetings soon after he was informed of the news at around 7 am. He pushed the hunt for the group into ever-higher gear as the afternoon wore on, liaising with the MHA in New Delhi

12:30 pm: Found — but not quite

At just after 12.30 pm, the police got the break they were looking for: Salwinder Singh’s phone, snatched by his kidnappers, was used to make the first of a series of four phone calls to known Jaish-e-Muhammad operatives in Bahawalpur. More than 12 hours would pass before the terrorist on the line made his last call, at 1.58 am on January 2 — bidding farewell to his mother.

From the cellphone data, it was clear the terrorists were in Pathankot making clear that the target was also somewhere in the area. Later that afternoon, at 3.30 pm, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval held a meeting with the Chief of Army Staff, General Dalbir Singh Suhag; the Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Arup Raha, and Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma.

Earlier that day, a message had been sent to all military bases: “Suspicious movement of vehicle no PB02 BW0313 Mahindra XUV with terrorists in Army uniform spotted in Gurdaspur at 0500hrs”.

“Inputs of terrorists in close vicinity of Army camps”, the message was now updated to read. “Please alert all guards and pickets and keep QRTs (Quick Reaction Teams) and columns ready for deployment to strike at short notice”.

At 8.30 pm, two Special Force teams, QRTs, and six Mine Protected Vehicles from the Army were in place at Mamoon just 10 min from the airbase. Why were they not sent to the base directly? “The attack could have taken place anywhere so we needed to have flexibility on deployment,” said an Army official.

Fearing that the attack could also target hundreds of military families living in Pathankot, Doval ordered the National Security Guard into Pathankot at 9 pm, in case a hostage situation developed. The force, NSG sources said, was ordered to be prepared to deal with a hostage situation, or in case critical military assets, like the aircraft in Pathankot, were hit in an assault. At 10.10 pm, 130 NSG personnel arrived at the base, at 2.30 am, 80 more joined them.

Everything, in theory, was in place. In practice, things were very different.

The cellphone data, notably, didn’t tell the intelligence services much. It showed that the phones the terrorists were using were broadcasting to the cellphone tower that covered the Air Force base. The problem was that the cellphone tower also covered a lot else. Depending on the height of the cellphone tower, the physical topography, and even climactic conditions, cellphone towers transmit signals up to several kilometres — and in low-rise Pathankot, that meant it covered not just the airbase, but dozens of other buildings.

In practice, that meant all potential targets in Pathankot were expected to ensure their own perimeter was secure until they were assaulted by terrorists, in the kind of dramatic frontal assaults fidayeen units have often staged elsewhere in the country.

This assumption, the second part of The Indian Express investigation has found, was where things went wrong.

(Tomorrow: When the first shots were fired)

VIDEO: Drug and terror nexus at the heart of #PathankotAttacks?

VIDEO: Fresh terror scare; suspect detained outside Pathankot airport

SLIDESHOW: Pathankot Air Force base attacked!

An Indian army soldier is seen during a search operation in a forest area outside the Pathankot air force base on Sunday.

Vasundhra

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

PAK TERRORISM - : PART TWO & ONE :: PATHANKOT - Probing Pathankot Attack

Probing Pathankot Attack: All Alert, All Caught Unawares — Luck their Strongest Ally

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