"One of the gunmen snatched my phone and made calls to Pakistan,"
Singh said. Urdu, widely spoken in Pakistan, can be mostly understood by
Hindi speakers.
Indian policeman: Militants abducted me before base attack(India Express)
The day before a deadly assault on an air base in northern India, a police officer returning from a temple was abducted by a group of heavily armed men speaking Urdu, he said on Tuesday.
"The minute I saw them I realised that they were terrorists," Police Superintendent Salwinder Singh told media.
"One of the gunmen snatched my phone and made calls to Pakistan," Singh said. Urdu, widely spoken in Pakistan, can be mostly understood by Hindi speakers.
The
colleague Singh called after he was freed treated it as an armed
robbery, one in a string of security lapses preceding the Jan. 2 assault
on the Pathankot air base that killed 7 Indian security personnel and
injured 22.
Mobile phone tower records indicate
the perpetrators made calls from Singh's phone from inside the air base
by mid-afternoon on Jan. 1, according to the Indian Express, some 12
hours before the government said it had detected them through aerial
surveillance.
Operations to secure the vast air
base in Punjab state stretched into a fourth day on Tuesday, as forces
cleared the grounds and hundreds of police combed a forested area
surrounding the base for possible collaborators.
Indian
forces had killed five militants involved in the attack, but it was
unclear whether more remained at large in the sprawling facility 25 km
(16 miles) from the Pakistani border.
"We cannot inform whether there are more militants or not," said Manish Mehta, an Indian army spokesman.
The
apparently well-planned assault on a strategic military target has cast
a shadow over efforts to improve relations between India and Pakistan. Talks between their foreign secretaries are due on Jan. 15.
On Monday, the United Jihad Council,
an alliance of pro-Pakistan militant groups based in the
Pakistani-administered part of the divided Kashmir region, claimed
responsibility for the assault, saying in a statement that "no sensitive
installation of India is out of our reach".
India
is mulling whether or not to go ahead with the talks with Pakistan, a
government official said on Monday, and would reach a decision after
operations at the air base are concluded.
Pakistan has strongly condemned the incident. Its foreign ministry said the government was committed to a "sustained dialogue process" and that India had shared leads on the assault.
It
remains unclear exactly how the attackers infiltrated the fortified and
guarded base, which has a 24-km (15-mile) perimeter surrounded by a
3-metre (10-foot) concrete wall topped with concertina wire.
As
clearance operations continued, military officials were developing a
plan to reinforce the base, a senior air force official in Delhi said,
including putting up new fencing and employing more modern security
technology.
"Security at every defence establishment will be evaluated," the official said.
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