US firm saw unprecedented spike in orders for Pahalgam satellite images 2 months before attack: Report

A top US-based space tech company witnessed an unprecedented spike in orders for high-resolution satellite images of Pahalgam and its surrounding areas two months before the April 22 attack at the tourist destination by terrorists who killed 26 civilians and several other injured.

According to a report by The Print, US firm Maxar Technologies received at least 12 orders between February 2 and February 22. As per the report, the number of orders is twice the usual number of orders Maxar receives.

In signs establishing Pakistan's connection to the terror attack, the orders for Pahalgam satellite images started appearing on the portal in June 2024, just months after Maxar partnered with Business Systems International Pvt Ltd (BSI), a Pakistan-based geo-spatial company linked to federal crimes in the US, the report added.

Notably, while the data does not show whether the orders for the Pahalgam satellite images were placed by the Pakistani firm, defence experts said that the coincidence was hard to dismiss given the track record of the company's founder, Obaidullah Syed.

Syed is a Pakistani-American businessman was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison by a US federal court for illegally exporting high-performance computer equipment and software application solutions from America to the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) — the agency that designs and tests high explosives and nuclear weapon parts, and develops solid-fuelled ballistic missiles.

As per the report, orders from different satellite frequency ranges for Pahalgam peaked in February 2025 with purchases made on the 12th, 15th, 18th, 21st, and 22nd. No orders were placed in March. An order was placed on April 12 — just ten days before the terror attack. Two requests for satellite images of the region were subsequently placed on April 24 and 29. No orders have been placed since.

The report further cites a Maxar subscriber as saying that anyone who is a paying partner with the US firm can see the satellite images others order unless the images ae of strategic importance. In the case of Pahalgam, the images were available to see for other paying partners along with the date of orders. However, the source cannot be traced without Maxar's permission.

BSI becoming a partner with Maxar Technologies is are concerning given the strategic details that some precise, high-resolution satellite images can give.

Moreover, the US Department of Justice states that BSI acted as a middleman for illegally routing resources for the Pakistani government agencies. In 2022, Obaidullah Syed, who also founded the Chicago-based BSI USA, pleaded guilty for exporting goods from the US without licence from the Department of Commerce and submitting false export information from 2006 to 2015.

According to its official website, BSI is headquartered in Karachi, with branches located all over Lahore, Islamabad, and Faisalabad. Operational since 1980, it claims to deal in “high performance computing, data mining, Geographical Information System (GIS), command and control systems and computational fluid dynamics” among other services.