Gurdaspur op frequently revised as Punjab cops wanted to lead.

[Juggernautjatt]

Ravi Dhaliwal
Tribune News Service
Dinanagar, July 27

The final manoeuvre to nab the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants engaged in today’s encounter had to be rescheduled on several occasions with the Punjab Police top brass repeatedly denying permission to the Army to take control of the entire operation.


The first helicopter carrying scores of Army men landed at the PAU regional station grounds at 9.43 am after an SOS was sent to the Tibri cantonment officials by DC Abhinav Trikha. The DC, after being given feedback about the latest development by senior police officers around 8.30 am, held hectic confabulations with other administration officers at his camp office.


However, after getting feedback from SSP Gurpreet Singh Toor, the DC sensed that the situation had the potential to go out of hand. At 8.43 am he took a final call. The Army had to be called in. A phone call was placed to the Tibri cantonment officials and the Army was asked to reach Dinanagar as “some terrorists had taken control of a police station in Dinanagar.”


Receiving the information, the Army went on an overdrive. The first of nearly half a dozen choppers landed exactly an hour after the DC had requested the Army to be in a “state of preparedness.” The soldiers were driven from the PAU campus in trucks to the police station, 10 km away.


An hour later, the venue was surrounded by nearly 150 Army men. A senior officer confided that initially the Army officers took a measure of what exactly was going on. Later, around 11.50 am, a senior Army officer requested the Punjab Police to hand over the operation to them. However, he was asked to wait with a senior officer telling him that only DGP Sumedh Singh Saini could take such a decision. The cops were on their toes waiting for their boss to arrive. Finally, Saini reached the operation site around 1 pm - more than seven hours after the militants had fired the first bullet in the city at 5.30 am.


Later, he met the DC, IG (border range) Ishwar Chander Sharma, DIG Arun Kumar Mittal, SSPs of Gurdaspur, Pathankot and Majitha and other senior officials.

“We decided to engage them with intermittent fire till they run out of ammunition. However, when we were ready to take the operation to another level, news filtered in that the terrorists might be ‘human bombs’. Once again we had to change our plans,” he disclosed. At this time, the Army once again asked the police to let them take control. However, this time police officers told them that all intricacies of raiding the old DSP’s office, where the militants had taken refuge, had been worked out and that only the police would be undertaking this operation. Even the 140-odd NSG and SPG commandoes were kept at bay.


Some senior officers had veered around to the view that the Army should be handed over the reigns. However, due to some inexplicable reason, which was never made public, the Army was again asked to wait. A team of the BSF was pulled out from duty from the border and placed at the disposal of the police. Meanwhile, the Army personnel did not sit idle and launched a massive search operation.

Op frequently revised as Punjab cops wanted to lead

 

[Aarush]

i must say it was overconfidence of punjab police....its good that all the terrorists have been neutralized by punjab police alone. but if follow the ops closely, the punjab police SWAT team was without bullet proof jacket, helmet and adequate training and tactics to face this type of situations whereas on the other hand terrorists were armed to teeth and on sucide mission...people will say that they were holed in to the station and surrounded but if by any means we can minimize the damage..we should go for it.
it could be a heavy damage but averted.

 

[saurav]

Punjab police loves this sort of operations... Solving petty cases is just too boring for them..

 

[Sneaker]

So they were indeed hunted like rats.. good to know...

 

[SwAggeR]

Punjab police loves this sort of operations... Solving petty cases is just too boring for them..

Why did they call in army if they decided to go alone ?? Army must have finished the job without the loss of SP Baljeet singh.I think that was poor decision by DGP .

 

[gau8av]

it's a shame they wasted so much time trying to take one alive but failed to do so in the end

 

[OrionHunter]

The final manoeuvre to nab the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants engaged in today’s encounter had to be rescheduled on several occasions with the Punjab Police top brass repeatedly denying permission to the Army to take control of the entire operation.

No wonder it took close to 11 hours to smoke them out. The present day Punjab Police are clueless in anti terror ops. They are as lost as hens in a pigsty. They're not equipped or trained for such ops. But the police brass wanted all the credit for slaying them. There are awards and medals to be had and here was an opportunity to bag a police medal or two!!

But they screwed it up real bad. Here's to mud in their eyes!

 

[SwAggeR]

No BPJ and they are so called special forces. Their DGP or in turn who may have been directed by his political masters sent these young chaps to their death. Army was better equipped , if not trained to tackle the situation.

 

[thesolar65]

What they did was good as they now have good amount of experience(with some stupidity like without helmet, vests etc.). It is not always advisable to depend on the Army. Every state must have some kind of S.W.A.T like trained unit with proper equipment...may be 100-200 personnel (every year). whenever these kind of situation takes place they will come in handy.

 

[Aarush]

Former General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Northern and Central Commands of the Army, Lt Gen HS Panag (Retd) on Tuesday lashed out at the Punjab Police Director General of Police, Sumedh Singh Saini, on Twitter for insisting on using the state police SWAT team and reportedly delaying the anti-terrorist operation in Dinanagar even though the Army was readily available.

In a series of hard-hitting tweets, Lt Gen Panag said that it was only because the DGP was keen to launch SWAT and make it a Punjab Police operation that there was delay of several hours in effectively taking on the terrorists. “Insistence on using SWAT…delayed the op. 3 Hrs to move. IA was there but not allowed to conduct op [sic],” tweeted the former Army Commander, adding that the delay was a repeat of 26/11 Mumbai terror attack.

“Egos must not drive counter terrorist operations,” he further tweeted. Lt Gen Panag said that the Indian Army units present on the scene of action should have acted on their own. “Centre cannot and does not monitor such ops minute to minute. At best IA units should have taken suo moto action.

I would have,” he tweeted. Later, speaking to The Indian Express, Lt Gen Panag said he stood by what he had tweeted earlier and that it was a tactical error and an unpardonable sin for having let the Army sit around and wait for SWAT to arrive when its own men could have done the job. “They were lucky that unlike in Mumbai, where casualties were caused due to late arrival of NSG, the same did not happen in Dinanagar,” he said. The Army, however, has maintained a studied silence on the entire episode.

Ex-Army Commander hits out at Punjab Police | idrw.org

 

[MilSpec]

No BPJ and they are so called special forces. Their DGP or in turn who may have been directed by his political masters sent these young chaps to their death. Army was better equipped , if not trained to tackle the situation.

No shit, but they did spent well on guns.... me likes.

 

[punit]

Why did they call in army if they decided to go alone ?? Army must have finished the job without the loss of SP Baljeet singh.I think that was poor decision by DGP .

i think The Late SSP was killed much early in the encounter.

 

[Abingdonboy]

Ravi Dhaliwal
Tribune News Service
Dinanagar, July 27

The final manoeuvre to nab the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants engaged in today’s encounter had to be rescheduled on several occasions with the Punjab Police top brass repeatedly denying permission to the Army to take control of the entire operation.


The first helicopter carrying scores of Army men landed at the PAU regional station grounds at 9.43 am after an SOS was sent to the Tibri cantonment officials by DC Abhinav Trikha. The DC, after being given feedback about the latest development by senior police officers around 8.30 am, held hectic confabulations with other administration officers at his camp office.


However, after getting feedback from SSP Gurpreet Singh Toor, the DC sensed that the situation had the potential to go out of hand. At 8.43 am he took a final call. The Army had to be called in. A phone call was placed to the Tibri cantonment officials and the Army was asked to reach Dinanagar as “some terrorists had taken control of a police station in Dinanagar.”


Receiving the information, the Army went on an overdrive. The first of nearly half a dozen choppers landed exactly an hour after the DC had requested the Army to be in a “state of preparedness.” The soldiers were driven from the PAU campus in trucks to the police station, 10 km away.


An hour later, the venue was surrounded by nearly 150 Army men. A senior officer confided that initially the Army officers took a measure of what exactly was going on. Later, around 11.50 am, a senior Army officer requested the Punjab Police to hand over the operation to them. However, he was asked to wait with a senior officer telling him that only DGP Sumedh Singh Saini could take such a decision. The cops were on their toes waiting for their boss to arrive. Finally, Saini reached the operation site around 1 pm - more than seven hours after the militants had fired the first bullet in the city at 5.30 am.


Later, he met the DC, IG (border range) Ishwar Chander Sharma, DIG Arun Kumar Mittal, SSPs of Gurdaspur, Pathankot and Majitha and other senior officials.

“We decided to engage them with intermittent fire till they run out of ammunition. However, when we were ready to take the operation to another level, news filtered in that the terrorists might be ‘human bombs’. Once again we had to change our plans,” he disclosed. At this time, the Army once again asked the police to let them take control. However, this time police officers told them that all intricacies of raiding the old DSP’s office, where the militants had taken refuge, had been worked out and that only the police would be undertaking this operation. Even the 140-odd NSG and SPG commandoes were kept at bay.


Some senior officers had veered around to the view that the Army should be handed over the reigns. However, due to some inexplicable reason, which was never made public, the Army was again asked to wait. A team of the BSF was pulled out from duty from the border and placed at the disposal of the police. Meanwhile, the Army personnel did not sit idle and launched a massive search operation.

Op frequently revised as Punjab cops wanted to lead

There needs to be a framework established for dealing with counter terror operations anywhere in the country. Specific units should be designated counter terror forces (NSG, RR, local/state special response teams, Garuds, MARCOs and PARA (SF) ). In the case of any terror attack anywhere in the country any such counter terror force in the immediate vicinity should be dispatched automatically- no approvals needed. It is then the first unit that arrives that gets to dictate the subsequent operations. Parallel to this the NSG hubs and the main counter terror-task force based in Delhi is put on alert and are all ready to go wherever, with the counter terror task force being dispatched no matter what and the moment they are on the scene they have the ULTAMATE, UNQUESTIONED authority, they are the top-most force in India for dealing with these incidents- no one has more expertise in these matters.

Whilst it seems lessons have been learnt from 26/11- the NSG were on scene in Gurdaspur very swiftly however they were not allowed to lead the operation because the state police/government did not want to relinquish their authority. It boggles the mind that one of the world's finest CT units was on the ground and was simply twiddling their thumbs whilst the Punjab police were pressing in their newly raised (relatively), inexperienced and clearly under-equipped (although they have the bloody equipment, so I'll just call this unprofessional) SWAT team.


This ego-driven BS on display in this incident could have gotten a LOT of people killed, including those poor buggers in the SWAT team who were running around with next to no tactical gear. The Punjab police were LUCKY, nothing more. I seriously hope they conduct some introspection and don't chalk this up as a "win" that validates they were right.

 

[SwAggeR]

The SWAT team requested the public to keep quiet during the anti-terror operation.