Op frequently revised as Punjab cops wanted to lead

Ravi Dhaliwal

Tribune News Service

Dinanagar, July 27

The final manoeuvre to nab the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants engaged in today’s encounter had to be rescheduled on several occasions with the Punjab Police top brass repeatedly denying permission to the Army to take control of the entire operation.

The first helicopter carrying scores of Army men landed at the PAU regional station grounds at 9.43 am after an SOS was sent to the Tibri cantonment officials by DC Abhinav Trikha. The DC, after being given feedback about the latest development by senior police officers around 8.30 am, held hectic confabulations with other administration officers at his camp office. 

However, after getting feedback from SSP Gurpreet Singh Toor, the DC sensed that the situation had the potential to go out of hand. At 8.43 am he took a final call. The Army had to be called in. A phone call was placed to the Tibri cantonment officials and the Army was asked to reach Dinanagar as “some terrorists had taken control of a police station in Dinanagar.”

Receiving the information, the Army went on an overdrive. The first of nearly half a dozen choppers landed exactly an hour after the DC had requested the Army to be in a “state of preparedness.” The soldiers were driven from the PAU campus in trucks to the police station, 10 km away.

An hour later, the venue was surrounded by nearly 150 Army men. A senior officer confided that initially the Army officers took a measure of what exactly was going on. Later, around 11.50 am, a senior Army officer requested the Punjab Police to hand over the operation to them. However, he was asked to wait with a senior officer telling him that only DGP Sumedh Singh Saini could take such a decision. The cops were on their toes waiting for their boss to arrive. Finally, Saini reached the operation site around 1 pm - more than seven hours after the militants had fired the first bullet in the city at 5.30 am.

Later, he met the DC, IG (border range) Ishwar Chander Sharma, DIG Arun Kumar Mittal, SSPs of Gurdaspur, Pathankot and Majitha and other senior officials. 

“We decided to engage them with intermittent fire till they run out of ammunition. However, when we were ready to take the operation to another level, news filtered in that the terrorists might be ‘human bombs’. Once again we had to change our plans,” he disclosed. At this time, the Army once again asked the police to let them take control. However, this time police officers told them that all intricacies of raiding the old DSP’s office, where the militants had taken refuge, had been worked out and that only the police would be undertaking this operation. Even the 140-odd NSG and SPG commandoes were kept at bay.

Some senior officers had veered around to the view that the Army should be handed over the reigns. However, due to some inexplicable reason, which was never made public, the Army was again asked to wait. A team of the BSF was pulled out from duty from the border and placed at the disposal of the police. Meanwhile, the Army personnel did not sit idle and launched a massive search operation.

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