Days after the BSF (Border Security Force) cameras picked up the movement of eight people across the Indo-Pak border in Gurdaspur district, various security agencies, including the Punjab Police, have intensified search operations in and around the Dorangla town near the border.
Fearing terrorists may have sneaked into the State, security forces are working on a high alert in the area and have spread out across the district. They apprehend that the movement captured by BSF camera could be a ploy to divert the attention to facilitate entry of their associates in the state from some other side.
Besides, the Gurdaspur district administration has also banned the “dusk-to-dawn” movement along with the Indo-Pak international border.
Gurdaspur District Magistrate Pardeep Sabharwal stated that any type of movement of civilian within 500 metres of fencing fire and 1000 metres of Indo-Pak border would be banned from 8 pm to 5 am.
However, the ban would not apply on the Army, BSF, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Home Gaurd and Centre Excise and Taxation staff which were deployed on the border for special duty.
“You cannot rule out any possibility…we have to be very cautious, and this is out reaction to that. There is possibility that they diverted our attention to a particular area where those seven-eight men were spotted while their colleagues could have entered from some other area,” a senior Police official told The Pioneer.
The police have constituted special teams which is guarding at strategic points in the district. Special focus was also laid on the Pathankot-Amritsar railway track that touches Dinanagar, Gurdaspur, Dhariwal and Batala. The police is also carrying out sanitizing exercise of the railway track along
with the Government Railway Police (GRP).
Besides, the police personnel, both in uniform and plain clothes, have fanned out in the city warning residents to be wary of crowded places and unidentified objects.
Other than that, the also hunted through the agriculture fields in search of infiltrators. “There are sugarcane fields, and farmers have also constructed rooms near the tubewells which can be possible hideouts,” said the official.
Now, the police is planning to raze the standing sugarcane crops, and compensate the farmers.
Dorangala is a sugarcane-rich belt and the crop has already attained a height of 10-15 feet, enough to give refuge to the terrorists.