Centre denies intelligence failure in Pulwama attack

The Pulwama terror attack was not a result of intelligence failure, minister of state for home affairs G Kishan Reddy told Parliament on Wednesday.

Replying to a question by Congress’ Syed Nasir Hussain in Rajya Sabha, Reddy said, “All agencies are working in a coordinated manner and the intelligence inputs are shared among agencies on a real-time basis”.

Over 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel lost their lives when a suicide bomber, affiliated to the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed, attacked their convoy in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama on February 14.

The Indian forces claimed they had carried out a retaliatory attack, as part of which air strikes were launched on a terrorist camp in Pakistan’s Balakot on February 26.

Hussain sought to know how did the car “join the highway from a slip road which carried around 300 kg of explosives” if there was no intelligence failure.

Reddy said, “The investigation by NIA [National Investigation Agency] into the Pulwama attack so far, has resulted in identifying the conspirators, suicide attacker and the vehicle provider.”

He added that a large number of terrorists have been killed in the past few years because of the government’s “zero tolerance” policy towards terrorism...[in J&K], he said.

Replying to another query, posed by BJP’s Prabhat Jha, Reddy said that Indian forces have killed more than 800 terrorists since 2014. In 2014, 110 militants were killed, 108 in 2015, 150 in 2016, 213 in 2017 and 257 in 2018, Reddy said. He claimed that the Centre has formed a Joint Monitoring Committee comprising various agencies at the central level and a multi-disciplinary Terror Monitoring Group at the state level for sustained action against terror funding.