No way out: Trapped in flooded tunnels, Pahalgam terrorists were tracked and eliminated

Pahalgam terrorists

After the Pahalgam terror attack, Union Minister Amit Shah flew to Kashmir and directed a high-level meeting to ensure that the attackers did not escape to Pakistan.

Shah instructed security forces on the ground that the attackers “must not succeed in returning to Pakistan.”

Chalking out a plan, security agencies identified an 8-km infiltration route commonly used by terrorists and fortified the region. In the process, they discovered secret tunnels used for cross-border movement and deliberately flooded them, effectively cutting off escape paths, NDTV reported, citing sources.

With these exit routes sealed, security teams launched a manhunt and successfully tracked down and eliminated the terrorists behind the Pahalgam ambush.

For three months, the terrorists Suleiman, Afghani and Jibran were in hiding. All of the Pakistani nationals could not return because of the security forces' strategy to prevent their escape.

Shah pulled an all-nighter in coordination with the forensic team in Chandigarh to confirm that the three terrorists killed in Operation Mahadev near Srinagar were the same men who carried out the massacre in Pahalgam’s Baisaran Valley.

According to sources cited by NDTV, Shah worked through Monday night, tracking every step of the forensic process before informing Parliament. Scientists at the Chandigarh Forensic Science Laboratory worked overnight to match bullets recovered from the Pahalgam site with those fired from the terrorists’ weapons seized in Monday’s encounter.

A special plane flew the arms from Srinagar to Chandigarh, while another aircraft brought a ballistic machine from Ahmedabad to aid the testing.

By early Tuesday morning, the Home Minister received confirmation: the bullets matched.

Shah, sources said, stayed up till 5 am, in constant contact with forensic teams via phone and video calls. He slept for a few hours before heading to Parliament to deliver the confirmation on the floor of the House.

“There is no room for doubt. I am holding the ballistic report. Six scientists have cross-checked it and confirmed to me over video call that the bullets fired at Pahalgam and the bullets fired from these guns are a 100 per cent match,” Shah told the Lok Sabha during the Operation Sindoor debate.

The encounter

As Defence Minister Rajnath Singh began the debate on Operation Sindoor on Monday, a gunfight was underway in Lidwas, near Srinagar. Acting on weeks of intercepted communications, a joint team of the Army, CRPF, and Jammu and Kashmir Police zeroed in on a terrorist hideout. In the firefight that followed, three heavily armed militants were killed, and a cache of assault rifles and rifle grenades was recovered.

Security forces suspected the slain terrorists were responsible for the Baisaran Valley killings. But the Centre needed solid proof before going public.

The terrorists’ weapons were flown to Chandigarh, where scientists fired them and compared the casings to those found at the Pahalgam attack site. The result was a 99 per cent match, after which the Union Minister made it offical in the Lok Sabha debate on Operation Sindoor.