The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has approved a plan to charter flights to transport Central Armed Police Force (CAPF) personnel deployed in the Kashmir Valley.
A commercial flight will be available six days a week exclusively for the movement of personnel from Srinagar-Delhi-Srinagar and Srinagar-Jammu-Srinagar, CRPF Director-General R.R. Bhatnagar told The Hindu .
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The officer said intelligence had been gathered in the past two days and operations against terrorist elements would follow soon. “We operate under the parameters of law; there will be operations in conjunction with other security forces.”
He said that following the Pulwama attack, a lot of false and inflammatory photographs were being circulated to incite passions, and an advisory had been issued warning people not to forward such posts on social media.
A car-borne suicide bomber rammed a CRPF bus, part of a 78-vehicle convoy that was moving from Jammu to Srinagar on February 14, killing 40 personnel near Pulwama in south Kashmir. The suicide attack was claimed by the Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), and the bomber was identified as Adil Ahmed Dar, a resident of Pulwama.
Mr. Bhatnagar said the movement of large convoys was inevitable. “We have not had any convoy attack in the past two years. Now, we will have to initiate measures to counter this. With plans to fly the troops, we will be able to curtail some of the convoys but there will always be a need to move men and machine… Since elections are coming, there will be movement,” he said.
“The convoy movement is visible to everyone. It starts in the morning and so the question of any leak of its movement is irrelevant, it runs almost daily. We have also designated Delhi as a transit camp now. So they can fly directly to Srinagar and not halt at Jammu first,” he said. Most personnel who were part of the convoy that was hit by the suicide bomber were bunched up at the Jammu camp for days as the highway was closed due to snowfall.
He said professional counselling will be extended to the personnel if they still felt traumatised after the February 14 incident. The CRPF bus that bore the impact of the explosion was fifth in the convoy and had 39 personnel on board. It was followed by other buses and vehicles.
“We have asked all our commandants to speak to the personnel, especially those who were in the immediate vicinity of the bus. There is a sense of loss but there is determination also ….they know they are a fighting force and they have to take up the challenge,” he said.
He said the convoys have been strengthened immensely in terms of making the vehicles bullet- resistant. “But blast protection is totally different, even a bullet-proof vehicle is no protection against the blast,” he said.
