Srinagar: The nearly 57-hour-long armed standoff outside Jammu and Kashmir’s highway town of Pampore ended on Wednesday evening with the killing of both militants holed up inside a multi-storey government building which was pounded with mortar and rocket fire by the Army.
Officials said the slain men were "exceptionally motivated and highly trained terrorists" most probably belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and survived because the 7-storey building was used by them like a concrete bunker. Over 50 rockets and hundreds of grenades besides machineguns and small arms were used in the operation, causing extensive damage to the building. During the operation, the Army which was assisted by the BSF, the CRPF and J&K police’s counterinsurgency Special Operations Group (SOG) used the DRDO Netra, light-weight autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) fitted with cameras, for surveillance and reconnaissance.
At the first hint of sunrise on Wednesday, the security forces launched a “decisive” assault against the remaining militant and, at about 9.15 am, five commandos of the Army’s Parachute Regiment, the same special forces which had carried out surgical strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) last month, were seen entering the battered and burnt building through a first-floor window using a ladder.
Read: Pampore gunbattle: Terrorists were probably from LeT, says Army
Seven hours later, the Army and J&K Police officials announced the stand-off had ended and that both militants had been killed. There was no third militant inside as suspected earlier.
After a search of around 50 rooms and as many bathrooms in the now tattered building there was no third militant or his body present, said the Army. The corpses of slain militants were retrieved during the combing operation and the authorities said that their identity is being ascertained.
The militants had barged into the sprawling campus of the Jammu and Kashmir Entrepreneurship Development Institute (JKEDI) at Sempora, Pampore, along the Srinagar-Jammu highway and about 16 kilometres south of the summer capital, at about 6.30 am on Monday using the rear side after reportedly crossing the River Jhelum from one bank (Rakh-e-Shalina) to the other (Sempora) in a boat. They occupied the 7-storey hostel building and set on fire a few mattresses to attract the attention. Why they did that is a mystery.
Since the JKEDI like other institutions is closed for more than three months because of the unrest triggered by the killing of Hizb-ul-Mujahedin commander Burhan Muzaffar Wani no student or faculty or staff member was present there.
The Army’s Special Forces rushed to the spot from nearby Badami Bagh cantonment where the headquarters of 15 (Chinar) Corps are located. Also, the paramilitary forces personnel and the members of the CRPF and J&K police’s SOG joined them to encircle the campus. In the initial stage of the operation, one Army jawan was injured in his foot. The Army fired mortars and other projectiles to ‘neutralize’ militants as a result of which the building suffered damage and flames and thick smoke could be seen billowing out from distance.
The operation was suspended at the nightfall and resumed with first light on both these days to avoid collateral damage keeping in view the fact that a similar clash at the same place in February this year had left two Army captains Pawan Kumar and Tushar Mahajan and corporal Om Prakash dead as they had tried to make an assault move during the night time.
