As soon as the news of the cowardly attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district reached the national Capital, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Home Minister Rajnath Singh and spoke to other top officials in the PMO. He also called upon National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and stressed upon to take action against the terrorists.
Singh soon called a high-level meeting at the Home Ministry wherein heads of all security and intelligence agencies were present to discuss the evolving situation. In order to avoid cascading effect across, it was decided to send a National Investigation Agency (NIA) team to Srinagar along with forensic experts and issue a media advisory as well.
Singh, who was supposed to visit Patna on Friday, cancelled the trip and is likely to visit Srinagar on Friday morning. The Ministry of Home Affairs said that it is closely monitoring the situation in the state.
Intelligence agencies, who believed that only remnants of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) were present in the Valley, are baffled at the scale of Thursday's attack. Almost the entire leadership of JeM has been wiped out over the years.
Sources said that US-designated global terrorist JeM chief Masood Azhar's brother Mufti Abdul Rauf Asghar could be the main conspirator behind the attack in league with Pakistan's intelligence agency — ISI.
Inputs received by the agencies suggested the JeM had been rebuilding its network in south Kashmir over the last three months.
Pakistani agencies wanted to give some breathing space to Hizbul Mujahideen and LeT, both of which have suffered huge losses last year.
Last year, security forces had claimed a big win after Mohammad Usman, believed to be the head of the module behind sniper attacks on forces in the Valley, was killed by security men. Usman was the nephew of Moulana Masood Azhar, the chief of Jaish-e-Mohammad.
In 2017, security forces killed Jaish's operational chief Khalid in Baramulla.
Those tracking developments in the state said a suicide car attack was a sign of things crumbling down. In a recent meeting within the security forces, the threat posed by suicide attacks was discussed based on recent intelligence inputs. However, there is no viable combat option to such threats so far, sources said.
Car bomb, said a senior officer, usually happens in Syria and Afghanistan. It had not taken place in Kashmir over past two decades.
"We have never received as many alerts about a suicide strike as we have been getting for the past 10 days. We understand that the groups are quite desperate to strike back after we incurred heavy losses on them throughout last year, but the fact that they're planning on carrying out multiple suicide strikes is a much bigger security challenge," said a highly placed source.
The attack received wide spread condemnation across the political spectrum. Expressing his anguish, Modi said: "Attack on CRPF personnel in Pulwama is despicable. I strongly condemn this dastardly attack. The sacrifices of our brave security personnel shall not go in vain. The entire nation stands shoulder to shoulder with the families of the brave martyrs. May the injured recover quickly."
It is the rarest of rare fidayeen attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district, 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) jawans were killed leaving the entire nation in shock and pain. A SUV laden with explosives driven by local recruit of terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed rammed into a CRPF convoy vehicle on the Srinagar-Jammu highway at 3:15 pm killing all the jawans in the vehicle on the spot. The attack is worse than that of 2016 Uri terror attack that claimed 18 jawans.
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