New Delhi: As part of measures to curb cross-border infiltration, Border Security Force (BSF) has completed trenching along two-thirds of an area in Jammu region prone to infiltration via tunnels, ThePrint has learnt.
Trenching is complete along nearly 24 km of a 31-km stretch between Jammu, Samba and Kathua prone to infiltration, said sources, adding tunnels in this area were identified as a possible entry point for terrorists in light of the spate of ambushes and targeted killings last year.
ThePrint reported earlier that security forces—including from the Army, Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) and Jammu and Kashmir Police—lost more than 50 lives between 2021 and July last year to ambushes laid by terrorists, who were suspected to have entered India in the recent past.
“Work on this dismantling of tunnels began a couple of months before assembly elections in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir and we are likely to complete the exercise latest in a span of a couple of months,” a source in the BSF told ThePrint.
Last month, BSF shifted two of its companies, comprising nearly 200 troops, from the Left Wing Extremism (LWE) theatre in Odisha and deployed them to Jammu. Jammu shares a 192-km international border with Pakistan. This border is manned by BSF, while a larger part of the Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir is under operational control of the Army.
Tunnels were identified as one of the “lacunae” that may have been used by terror operatives, but security agencies are yet to find a “substantive” lead on the infiltration route.
“Their [terrorists’] modus operandi has changed off late with an absolute blanket ban on use of mobile phones that allowed us to track and hunt them down but use of encrypted apps that run on satellite made tracing their locations very difficult,” said an officer in the security establishment.
Officials, however, expressed confidence that security forces’ engagement with terror operatives has surged lately, suggesting an improvement in the mechanism to track and neutralise them. “The engagement of forces with these operatives hold key as it confirms that they are being identified and located. Not all of them have fallen into oblivion, out of our sight,” said another office in the security establishment who didn’t wish to be named.
To detect and counter the challenge of infiltration through tunnels, BSF has also been deploying scanners on an experimental basis. These scanners can detect tunnels dug till up to 10 feet deep from the ground. “There are different types of scanners that are being used to check effectiveness. Some work on detecting vibration beneath the surface to detect freshly dug or ongoing digging exercises of tunnels in the range while some scan the textures and anomalies in the soil particles,” a third officer said.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)