Militants in Army fatigues storm J&K thana, 6 killed

JAMMU: Two heavily-armed terrorists, posing as soldiers in Army fatigues, stormed a police station and killed three people before they were gunned down at Rajbagh in Jammu & Kashmir’s Kathua district on Friday.
Sources said the terrorists arrived at the station in a vehicle, which they had boarded posing as soldiers after stopping it on the pretext of checking it around half a kilometer away.
The terrorists asked the vehicle driver to take them to the station, where they made a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) guard open the main gate claiming they had to handover three “suspects” along with them to the cops.
“As soon as the sentry opened the gate, the militants drove the vehicle inside the police station and fired indiscriminately besides hurling grenades,’’ a police officer said.
The sentry was killed along with another CRPF trooper, a Jammu & Kashmir police constable and a civilian.
A deputy superintendent rank police officer was among 11 people wounded in the five-hour gun-battle that followed between security forces and the two holed up terrorists inside the station.
Additional troops were rushed to take out the terrorists, while the nearby Jammu-Pathankot highway was closed.
At least two dozen paramilitary and police officers, trapped inside the station, were rescued before the two terrorists were killed by noon. Combing operations were going on when reports last came in.
Defence spokesman Lt Col Manish Mehat said the terrorists were killed in a joint Army, CRPF and J&K police operation.
“The Army deployed Quick Reaction Teams and Special Forces for the operation,’’ he said and added the modus operandi of terrorists was being ascertained.
This was the first terrorist attack since the People’s Democratic Party-BJP coalition government was formed in the state earlier this month.
It was the second terror strike near Jammu in a year. Earlier, 10 people, including three soldiers and as many civilians, were killed when four terrorists attacked an Army bunker at Arnia along the India-Pakistan border in Jammu in November.
This came eight months after three people, including a soldier, were killed in separate terror attacks at Dayalachak and Janglote in Kathua in March 2014.
The fresh Kathua attack rocked the Jammu & Kashmir assembly, where the opposition members sought explanation from the government.
National Conference (NC) legislator Devender Singh Rana took up the matter and asked how terrorists could launch the attack. Other NC and Congress members joined him in voicing their outrage.
They protested deputy chief minister Nirmal Singh’s “unsatisfactory” answer and criticized the government for being “ill-informed”.
Former chief minister Omar Abdullah condemned the attack, and said the terrorists may have used the same routes to infiltrate again.
He said he had asked the Border Security Force to close local rivulets along the border which terrorists use to infiltrate during his tenure.