Pathankot terror attack: We weren't surprised by them, they were surprised by us: Officer

Living up to the promise made by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar a day earlier, the air force, on Wednesday, took the present media on a short 15-minute guided tour inside the Pathankot air force base, the site of militant infiltration and combat that started on January 1. As the combing operations were on during the day, with the National Security Guard searching for and dealing with the bodies of the killed militants, and remaining explosive material, there were enough remnants in the sprawling greenery filled compound of the bloody battle that had taken place. 

The first point of contact, according to the forces, was near the military engineering services or MES-MT yard, an open garage space with dark coloured military trucks and other heavy duty vehicle. The  are was still cordoned off, as the NSG went inside with one man in the bulky olive green bomb defusal suit to attend to remaining blinds, the technical term for unexploded shells or grenades.
That is where, the defence personnel guiding the tiny yellow school bus filled with journalists, said the first militant had fallen. Though the officer accompanying the press gave very brief descriptions of the areas, he did add that “we weren’t surprised by them, they were surprised by us.”

The area shown was largely residential, filled with basketball courts, white and blue building with rooms for unmarried airmen staying without families, built like a college campus. The base’s perimeter wall, with its barbed wire, could be seen in many places, bordered either by civilian houses built so closely that the TV satellite dishes were almost inside the base, or in some forested areas by tall trees. It was difficult to imagine that this quiet, largely domestic looking space, had seen such “action”, as the defence forces called it. Reminders came in the form of trenches with armed commandos standing guard in them, interspersing these innocuous areas. The basketball courts, the force said, were where the security forces had responded from.

Behind these residential quarters, as they pointed out, were swathes of empty plots, filled with shrubbery and vegetation, where they say they contained the infiltrators. One such area, the second point of contact, as seen from afar, was the centre of much activity as the militants’ bodies could be seen still lying there.

Black-clad NSG commandos, the army and men from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in charge of the probes, swarmed the place. Sources said that a team of six doctors from the Pathankot civil hospital was on hand to carry out postmortem of the bodies once it was ascertained there were no more booby traps and it safe to approach them. This postmortem, sources said started later in the evening. 

Close to this field was a cookhouse, near which jawan Jagdish Chand had died taking out one terrorist.

The NIA team could also be seen at work at the DSC lines where the jawans stay. 

The starkest sign of battle was the one residential building damaged in explosions used to kill the last two infiltrators. Still standing, it was a shell of a building, with signs of normal life scattered about. Most of its ground floor walls had massive holes in them where they had been blown up. There were twisted frames of motorbikes of former residents lying on the ground, and a row of bicycles on one side. The more intact first floor was charred black. A clothesline still hung there, with a few vest hanging limply, once while and now covered with soot. 

Just next to it was another row of similarly built residential complexes, with men still staying there. 

The 3000 families were still at the base, with guards deployed for their protection.