Drone-delivered arms and ammunition recovered near Pakistan border
An improvised explosive device (IED), two pistols, four magazines, two batteries, a detonator, and Indian currency worth nearly ₹5 lakh a Pakistani drone is suspected to have dropped were recovered at Ramgarh in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K)’s Samba district, police said on Thursday.
This is the second such case this month in the region, where drones have been used to drop weapons, drugs, ammunition, arms, and money to fuel the insurgency.
Tribhuvan Khajuria, a local police officer, said they were tipped off about a suspicious packet carrying the weapons in a field at Ramgarh. He added they immediately rushed to the scene and cordoned off the area, around 10 km from the India-Pakistan border.
“A bomb disposal squad was also requisitioned and the IED was destroyed in a controlled explosion,” Khajuria said. He added no arrests have been made so far and that they were probing the matter.
In June last year, two Indian Air Force personnel were injured in blasts carried out through drones at the Jammu airport, which is used for strategic operations and VVIP movements. Two drones were noticed in a military area in Jammu within 24 hours of the twin drone explosions.
The fresh recovery on drone-delivered arms came days after the Border Security Force (BSF) shot dead a Pakistani intruder and captured another person at separate places along the Pakistan border in the Jammu region on Tuesday. The person was found to be suffering from a mental disorder and was repatriated to Pakistan.
On November 15, two drone-delivered IEDs were found near a police post in the border area of Phallain Mandal in the Jammu district. The IEDs and timers were later destroyed in a controlled explosion.
On August 18, the National Investigation Agency carried out searches in Jammu, Srinagar, Kathua, Samba, and Doda districts in a case related to the recovery of a drone used for the delivery of arms, ammunition, and explosives for an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The BSF detected around 79 drone flights along the India-Pakistan international border in 2020. They increased to 109 last year and more than doubled to 266 this year.
Source: Hindustantimes
