GURDASPUR - Ten people, including three civilians and a police superintendent, were killed on Monday when gunmen wearing army uniforms stormed a police station in northern India near the border with Pakistan, sparking a shootout lasting almost 12 hours.
Five live bombs were recovered from nearby railway tracks, forcing train services to be cancelled in the usually calm northern state of Punjab amid suggestions by some Indian security quarters in their knee-jerk reaction that the attackers came from Pakistan.
Pakistan however issued a formal statement condemning the assault and extending condolences to the government and people of India, pushing back negative propaganda. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his top ministers have not made detailed statements on the attack.
Police said three attackers had been killed in the battle with security forces that began at about 5am on Monday and ended around 5pm. Three civilians and four police officers including the local superintendent also died.
The gunmen shot dead a man at a bus station in Dinanagar and tried to hijack a bus. They then seized a white Maruti-Suzuki at gunpoint and rushed to the local police station, witnesses said. The car was abandoned next to the police station with its windshield peppered with bullet holes, broken glass and bullet casings on the passenger seat.
Hours later, once the police station was secured, police moved cautiously to clear a red outhouse to its rear. A cheer went up from onlookers as police carrying automatic weapons emerged on the roof, signalling the end of the day-long battle.
“The police superintendent fought them bravely but unfortunately he was shot in the head and he died on the spot,” said Anand Kumar, part of the special forces team that entered the building. Local television stations showed scores of special forces personnel flashing victory signs and chanting slogans as they celebrated outside the partially damaged building.
One civilian was killed when the attackers opened fire at a bus station while the other two died at the police station, said Sumedh Singh Saini, director general of police for Punjab. He told reporters it was “too early to say” who the attackers were and where they had come from. They were equipped with automatic weapons, ammunition, and grenades. Two GPS satellite location devices found on the men would be examined for clues, he said.
Shoe shop owner Amit Sharma, 43, was woken by the sound of gunfire at dawn. “I thought someone was setting off firecrackers,” Sharma told Reuters. Instead, he saw three men with assault rifles “spraying bullets everywhere.” Throughout the day, regular bouts of small arms fire echoed across the town of Dinanagar and the surrounding paddy fields, some 15 km from the international border, Reuters witnesses said.
India’s national security adviser, Ajit Doval called it “a very serious terrorist attack,” according to local NDTV television news channel. Home Minister Rajnath Singh said he had ordered increased security on the border with Pakistan. Singh will make a detailed statement over the attack in Parliament today (Tuesday). A number of other states were also reported to be on high alert.
It was the first major attack in India’s Punjab for more than a decade and the state’s Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal blamed a lack of security on the border. “This militancy is a national problem, not a state problem, so it needs to be tackled with a national policy,” he told reporters. “If prior intelligence input had been given, they should have properly sealed the borders.”
Insurgents frequently target police in the volatile Kashmir region, which is divided between arch rivals India and Pakistan and claimed in full by both. But neighbouring Punjab, a majority-Sikh state, has largely been spared the violence that has plagued Indian Kashmir.
An armed rebellion for a separate Sikh homeland erupted in Punjab in 1983 but waned in the early 1990s. About 50,000 people died in that conflict. Some analysts speculate the attack could mark the reappearance of Punjabi separatists whose previous uprising also brought the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the hands of Sikh bodyguards in 1984.
Some media reports suggested the attackers behind Monday’s assault in Gurdaspur may have crossed into Punjab from Kashmir. Attacks on security installations by militants dressed as soldiers or police are common in Jammu, but Monday’s was the first such assault in Punjab in 13 years, according to data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal, which tracks militant violence.
Jitendra Singh, a junior minister in Modi’s office, said he did not rule out Pakistan’s involvement. “There have also been earlier reports of Pakistan infiltration and cross-border mischief in this area,” said Singh, whose constituency in the Jammu region borders the Gurdaspur district of Punjab where the shootout took place.
But Kashmir Jehad Council leader Syed Salahuddin, who is based in Pakistan, denied his men were involved. “They are not Kashmiris... According to my information, definitely not... They could be homegrown militants,” he told Reuters by telephone.
Monday’s attack comes weeks after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif spoke for about an hour during a summit in Russia. The meeting raised hopes of an improvement in perennially difficult relations, but was swiftly followed by a flare-up in violence along the de facto border in Kashmir.
India and Pakistan regularly accuse each other cross border firing at Kasmir and Sialkot borders, and fanning militancy on each other’s territory.
Pakistan denies Indian claims of involvement in insurgencies in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, which has a much heavier security presence to deal with operations by Kashmiri freedom fighters who attack security posts and often fight to the death. Islamabad on the other hand accused India of fanning terrorism in its largest city Karachi and biggest province Balochistan. The two countries have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947, two of them over the Himalayan region.