After taking control of the mobile phones of Gurdaspur SP Salwinder Singh and his jeweller friend Rajesh Verma, one of the terrorists, who subsequently attacked the Pathankot air base, placed a missed call to his handler in Pakistan.
An analysis of the calls made from Verma’s phone has shown that one of the six terrorists called gave a missed call to a Pakistani handler, who then called him up frequently to give instructions, intelligence sources said.
The sources said that while the record will be left on the caller’s handset, there will be no trace of the call either at the gateway through which calls go across to other countries, or the call data record (CDR).
An intelligence source familiar with special operations explained:
Missed calls are not traceable because no digital footprint is left at the gateway.
‘Martyr’ or Not?
Investigations so far show that Ikagar Singh, the so-called taxi driver from Bhagwal village right on the border, received a call from Pakistan at 9:10 pm on December 31. He told his parents that the call was from his maternal uncle who lives in Janial village, saying that he was leaving to attend a medical emergency.
Ikagar did, however, speak with his uncle at 9:36 pm after which his phone fell silent for a while before eight calls in quick succession were made to Pakistan from his handset.
With suspicions mounting that Ikagar helped the terrorists reach Kolian village, where he was brutally killed near the Kathlaur bridge on the Ravi (and may have been linked to drugs traffickers operating in the area), the Punjab Police and the state government found themselves in an embarrassing situation.
The police had planted stories in a national daily that Ikagar was innocent and received no phone calls from Pakistan. On the other hand, the Parkash Singh Badal government went out of its way to declare Ikagar a “martyr”, while announcing a compensation of Rs 5 lakh for his family. Badal also visited the family in Bhagwal.
But what continues to puzzle investigators is why the jeweller and the SP’s cook visited the dargah in Taloor village close to the India-Pakistan border on the morning of 31 December, only to return to the shrine with Salwinder Singh around 9 pm.
The Fishy Tale of the SP
The prolonged questioning of the SP by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) suggests that investigators are still not satisfied with his contrived and unconvincing cover story. It has sufficiently raised suspicions over his involvement in the cross-border drug trade, if not with the terrorists or their handlers.
There is a clear, though yet-to-be-established, link between the two visits to the shrine the same day with suspicions centring on the dargah caretaker Som Raj, who may have acted as a messenger for the cross-border drug dealers.
Was the dargah being used as a ‘safe house’ by the drugs traffickers/dealers? At the same time, what has caught the attention of NIA investigators is that Verma’s phone was used to make calls by the terrorists to their handlers in Pakistan after Salwinder’s blue beacon-topped vehicle was in their control. The SP, however, claimed that his phone was used to make the calls.
Security agencies have questioned the failure of the post-attack combing of the IAF base site where the bodies of four terrorists were found, while two are yet to be accounted for.
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