Dinanagar attack: BSF rubbishes theory, Punjab Police sticks to stand

A day after the Border Security Force (BSF) Punjab Frontier inspector general rubbished the Punjab Police theory that the terrorists who attacked the Dinanagar police station on July 27 came into India from the Punjab border, Punjab Police stuck to its stand.

A senior police officer involved in the Dinanagar attack investigation said, “The BSF is free to make its own observations based on their knowledge and wisdom. But whatever material evidence we had gathered from the site of the attack, we came to the conclusion that the militants came in from the Shakargarh tehsil of Pakistan and entered India from Tash area falling under Pathankot district.”

BSF IG Anil Paliwal, in a press conference held in Jalandhar on Monday, said they had checked the border after carrying an extensive exercise but had got no indications of the terrorists having crossed the border from Punjab. Paliwal, however, did not give any further information of the route the BSF believed the terrorists took to enter India.

Punjab cops said if the terrorists did not enter India from Pathankot, they would have come from the J&K border, which again is guarded by the BSF.

The two global positioning systems found on the men, suspected to be from Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, showed a map which they allegedly used to make their entry into India. The route coordinates pointed to their having crossed the Ravi, moved Makoura (Gurdaspur) in Punjab and then Marara in Gurdaspur tehsil before entering Dinanagar, 18 km from the border.

When contacted, Rohit Chaudhary, incharge of the SIT investigating the Dinanagar attack, said the BSF, on the request of Punjab Police, had increased deployment on the Punjab border following the incident. “Tactically, earlier the BSF deployment in J&K was to stop infiltration and in Punjab it was to curtail smuggling. Now the deployment in Punjab is also to contain infiltration. The deployment is almost double of what it was earlier,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Punjab government is yet to receive a letter from the National Investigation Agency asking the state police to hand over the investigation to them.