New Delhi: Hot on the trail of a terror module member whose bid earlier this week to sabotage a Dedicated Freight Corridor rail line in Patiala failed in a premature blast, the Punjab Police have recovered a huge cache of weapons and hardware, explosives and high-end pistols, state police chief Gaurav Yadav said Wednesday.
The hardware included one Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG), one metallic Improvised Explosive Device or IED (sticky bomb) weighing 2.296 kg along with three detonators with electric wire and a battery, two packs of synthetic explosive RDX weighing 1.456 kg, and one P-86 hand grenade.
The botched sabotage of the freight corridor connecting Punjab with other parts of the country left a 2.5-foot-deep crater and the body of the saboteur, one Jagroop Singh, in pieces. According to the preliminary incident report prepared by the police, the incident took place around 8.23 pm Monday on the Rajpura-Shambhu railway track in the vicinity of Bathonian Khurd village in Patiala district.
The haul also included three sophisticated Glock pistols and wireless sets that were hidden in a stable and car by the now deceased Jagroop Singh alias Jupa and his brother Satnam Singh in their native village of Panjwar. All the recoveries were made on the revelations of Satnam Singh who was arrested on Tuesday, just hours after the blast in Patiala.
The incident in Patiala sparked concerns among officials due to the emergence of a pattern of attacks against the Dedicated Freight Corridor in the state. Earlier, a similar botched sabotage attempt was made on the freight corridor at Sirhind in Fatehgarh Sahib district.
The state accounts for a major portion of one of the two major corridors spanning more than 1,300 km between Ludhiana and Son Nagar in Bihar.
The dedicated freight corridor is a major reform in the transportation sector of the industrial and trade sectors, launched to separate passenger from freight traffic on high-density routes.
Hours after Monday’s incident, the Patiala district police claimed to have busted a terror module led by one Pardeep Singh Khalsa from Mansa, a man allegedly in close proximity with Malaysia-based Sikh separatist terrorists as well as in contact with Pakistan-based arms suppliers.
As reported by ThePrint earlier, DGP Yadav said that the module was backed by a Malaysia-based entity using the name Jujhar Singh. According to DGP Yadav, Pardeep was also in touch with US-based Surinder Singh Thikriwal and the Pakistan-based chief of banned outfit Khalistan Zindabad Force, Ranjeet Singh Neeta. Hailing from Barnala district of the state, Thikriwal is based in the United States and has been named in several cases of terrorist activity by the Punjab Police.
Sources in the Punjab Police said that substantial funding has been found to be routed for the module members, but insist its functioning was based primarily on “radicalisation”.
They said that with the unravelling of the particular module, two other cases, such as the similar attempt at sabotage of the railway track on the dedicated freight corridor in Sirhind as well as a grenade attack on the facility of the Central Investigative Agency (CIA) in Moga district in November last year, have been cracked. However, DGP Yadav said that the investigators were determining the true extent of Jagroop’s involvement in the earlier cases.
Sources in the police further said that Jagroop made several trips to Malaysia and some to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates over a period of eight years, between 2014 and 2022. A detailed analysis of his travel history is to be conducted after receiving the relevant details from the Foreigners Regional Registration Office.
All four accused arrested in the case so far—Satnam Singh, Pardeep Singh, Kulwinder Singh and Gurpreet Singh—have been sent to police custody for seven days.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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