NEW DELHI: When NSG commando Lt Col EK Niranjan was killed at Punjab’s Pathankot airbase while trying to retrieve a grenade from a dead terrorist, army veteran Darshan Singh Dhillon was reminded of the 2002 Kaluchak massacre during which Pakistani militants took over a tourist bus and raided a military camp.
Lt Col (retd) Dhillon, who headed the Northern Command bomb disposal unit that was responsible for defusing IEDs, had led the mopping up operation after the terror strike. “My role this time was played by Lieutenant Colonel Niranjan, but he was not as lucky as me,” Dhillon told HT in an interview. On May 14, 2002, three suicide bombers hijacked a bus at Vijaypur in J&K’s Samba district. When bus neared Kaluchak, they opened fire on passengers, driver and conductor, before storming the army family quarters at the Kaluchak Cantonment, about 10 km from Jammu city, leaving over 30 people dead.
“When I reached the spot, one militant was still alive. The militants were carrying explosives, besides arms. My task was to clear the area of any explosives after the encounter,” said Dhillon, who defused more than 2,000 explosives in his nine years of service in the BD unit. “It was a horrible experience as the site was strewn with bodies of children, women and elderly parents of soldiers,” he recalled. “The militants didn’t even spare the tiny tots playing on the swings at a park.” According to the veteran, soldiers responded quickly though they had no prior intelligence about the attack.
“The only difference in Pathankot was that air force officials there had been alerted about the possible terror attack, which though could not be utilised due to confusion,” he said. Dhillon also said an element of haste may have cost Niranjan his life. “There was a hurry to close the (Pathankot) operation to show it to the press as the home minister (Rajnath Singh) had already declared the operation as over,” the retired officer said, adding that bomb disposal procedures are tricky as bodies are often booby-trapped.
Dhillon also blamed national security adviser Ajit Doval for the “inept handling” of information that “transformed what should have been a short, intelligencedriven, counter-terrorist operation into something that seemed like a debacle.” The NSA, he said, left the Pathankot airbase in the hands of Defence Security Corps jawans, a handful of air force Garud commandos and NSG personnel, despite knowing that armed terrorists were in the vicinity.