The Hindu : IB tip-off saved the day in Jammu

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jan 04, 2004

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National

IB tip-off saved the day in Jammu

By Praveen Swami

NEW DELHI JAN. 3. Dozens of lives were saved during last night's suicide-squad attack on the Jammu railway station after the Intelligence Bureau (IB) warned that a terrorist strike was imminent.

An undercover IB operative, highly placed sources told , was at the station since Tuesday hoping to spot the members of the suicide squad. Although the operative was unable to identify the terrorists, police and military personnel were prepared for the strike and responded quickly to limit civilian casualties.

Sources said that an IB asset in Surankote, a small town east of Poonch, learned in December last about the plans for the attack. The information was then forwarded through the Jammu IB station to the police and military authorities.

Although evacuation and response plans had been drawn up in the wake of past attacks, the soldiers at the railway station were placed on a heightened state of alert. As a result, hundreds of passengers could be evacuated minutes after the terrorist assault began.

Two police personnel spotted the terrorists soon after they entered the station. Both wore military fatigues — as many terrorists have done earlier — but the lack of attention to detail gave them away. Both wore tennis shoes — one brown and the other white — with coloured socks. They came in through a public entrance, rather than the gate reserved for military personnel. Challenged by the police personnel, the terrorists were forced to open fire before they reached the most crowded areas of the platform.

The terrorists were clean-shaven and had cut their hair short to resemble soldiers. This suggests they had contact with civilians in the days before the attack, since terrorists hiding in the mountains grow their hair long and sport beards. Cloth resembling military fatigues is widely available in the State, and is used by soldiers who are not satisfied with the quality of the material issued by the military. The weapons for the attack, sources said, were moved to Jammu from Surankote.

"We have learned from our past mistakes," the Director-General of Police, Gopal Sharma, told , "and are happy at the way our counter-measures worked." Investigators are tight-lipped about the identity of the attackers, although suspicion points towards the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), responsible for the bulk of suicide assaults in the State.

While officials were unwilling to comment on the timing of the assault, it seems the move was intended to send a message to the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, on the eve of his departure for Islamabad to attend the SAARC summit. Although cross-border infiltration from Pakistan has been scaled back sharply and levels of terrorist violence have declined, the attack could have been intended to send a signal that `jehadi' groups continued to have the ability to inflict casualties.

Several jehadi groups have been critical of the nascent detente process between India and Pakistan, and the JeM is alleged to have recently attempted to assassinate Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf. Interestingly, Pakistani officials have not disclosed whether any punitive action against top Jaish leaders was being contemplated.

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