Gurdaspur ‘infiltrators’ scouting area for strike?

Dorangla (Gurdaspur) : Eight unknown men spotted near the India-Pakistan border in Gurdaspur recently may have been scouting the area for a possible militant strike, sources in the Border Security Force have said two days after the border guards saw “suspicious movement” in the area.
Sources claimed on Tuesday that the images captured by CCTVs showed what clearly looked like people near the border, after the force cast doubts over they what they had seen. A video showed the men, all unarmed, scattering when the border guards began firing at them, sources said.
“Our Jalandhar-based analysts who checked the contents of the DVR have found some useful information. A group of unarmed men were loitering at a distance of 800 metres to 1 km from the barbed wire fencing… We can say with conviction that they were not smugglers. They had come to carry out a recce. An infiltration bid at a later date cannot be ruled out. We have tightened security near the border while the police have been asked to act as the second line of defence,” a BSF officer said, not wanting to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the press.
Until Monday night, the force was unsure if they had seen humans or a herd cattle, sources said.
Although the BSF have refused to comment on the incident, police appeared to confirm that some people were spotted near the area.
The “incident”, which came within hours of another militant strike at an Army camp in Baramullah, led to increased security in Punjab’s borders, particularly after the state has seen saw two militants strikes within six months of one another in the past year and a half. Seventy personnel from the Punjab Armed Police have been deployed in area after the Punjab Police asked for them.“Now that we have concrete evidence that a group of men were sighted on the Pakistani side of the border we have increased surveillance in the area. All neighbouring villages are being searched. The operation will continue till tomorrow, when we will review it in the presence of senior officers. There are chances that the group may have acted as a camouflage to enable some men sneak in. We are ruling out nothing… we are leaving nothing to chance,” said Superintendent of Police Jasdeep Singh, who oversaw the deployment and remained at Dorangla for a large part of Tuesday.Three gunmen laid siege on a police station in Gurdaspur’s Dinanar on July 27, 2015. Six months later, on January 2, four gunmen stormed a base of the Indian Air Force in neighbouring Pathankot in a predawn strike. Both attack saw casualties — seven policemen had been killed in the daylong standoff in Dinanagar and as many security men were killed in Pathankot. Attackers were killed in both strikes.More recently, 19 soldiers were killed when four gunmen attacked an army camp in north Kashmir’s Uri on September 18.Less than 15 days after the strike, some militants attacked the base of the Indian Army’s 46 Rashtriya Rifles in Baramullah on Sunday. One guard of the BSF who was manning the perimeters of post was killed in the attack, but the militants escaped. The BSF reported some “suspicious movement” in Gurdaspur’s border hours later, leading to rumours that an infiltration attempt had been thwarted.