July 27, 2015 by admin

Punjab Police handling operation, Army at hand

Chandigarh, July 27 Even as the Army has moved troops, including Special Forces, to Dinanagar, near Gurdaspur, following the terror attack on Monday morning, the Punjab Police continued to handle the operation till late afternoon and had not requisitioned Army assistance. ADGP Hardeep Singh Dhillon said the Punjab Police was well equipped to handle a group of four militants. Meanwhile, a senior officer from the Western Command Headquarters of the Army said: “We have moved in troops from Tibri, Mamun and Samba military stations to the site of the operations. This includes elements from the Special Forces.” While declining to give out the number of troops mobilised, he said “sufficient number of troops” were available to deal with any contingency. Geographically, Dinanagar comes under the territorial jurisdiction of the Pathankot-based 29 Division of the Army, which is part of 9 Corps, headquartered at Yol Cantonment in Himachal Pradesh. Sources said the army troops had so far been deployed on the outer cordon, while the actual operation with the terrorists was being undertaken by the Punjab Police. Two officers of the rank of brigadier were on the spot to oversee the Army’s deployment and coordinate with the police and civilian agencies involved. While the identity of the terrorists, said to be four in number, was still to be established, some intelligence inputs suggested that they could have come from Narowal in Pakistan, which was known to be a training base for terrorists, and made their way south after infiltrating from the Jammu-Samba axis. The target spot is just 15 km from the Indo-Pak international border and is also close to the Punjab-Jammu and Kashmir inter-state border.