Investigators probing the February 14 suicide attack on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama have found shards of material from what seems like part of a jerrycan at the site and suspect that the explosion that killed 40 CRPF men on Thursday may have been packed in this.
Sources said that from the attack site, investigators picked up a car bumper, a few pieces of a jerrycan and the metal piece with a number.
The “chassis” piece has also led to a dead end. Investigators matched it with a car in the Valley but when a team reached the residence of the owner, it found the car there. The owner’s credentials were verified and cleared.
“It was just a clue the team was following. Probably, the metal piece was not from the chassis. And it was a coincidence that the number matched with a car. Hardly anything from the car has survived. We have picked up over 100 samples from the blast site. Everything is being verified,” the officer said.
Sources said it has also emerged that Jammu and Kashmir police generated an intelligence input only recently that convoys could be targeted with vehicle-borne IEDs between Pampore and Pulwama.
Meanwhile, Pak national and JeM member Kamran, suspected to have been killed in Monday’s encounter with security forces in Pulwama, is being touted by intelligence agencies as the man who trained Dar for the attack.
The probe has also revealed that sheer providence prevented greater casualties in the attack. “Where the attack happened, the road climbs. This meant that the bus behind the one that was attacked was at a distance of over 50 meters. On a flat stretch, they would have been closer,” the officer said.
Investigators suspect that the RDX may have been smuggled from across the border in small amounts through various JeM militants who infiltrated in the past couple of years. In a report sent to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in December last year, NIA had said that interrogation of several over-ground workers (OGWs) of JeM have revealed that in the past couple of years over 30 Jaish terrorists had infiltrated Kashmir through the Jammu border.
with inputs from news agencies.
