It took an extraordinary, all-hands-on-deck effort, an all-nighter by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, tireless work by forensic scientists, the use of a special aircraft, and rigorous test-firing to irrefutably confirm that the three terrorists eliminated in Operation Mahadev near Srinagar on Monday were the very same hands involved in killing the 26 innocents in Pahalgam’s Baisaran Valley in April.
According to media reports, the security forces had long suspected that the terrorists gunned down in the Lidwas encounter were the Pahalgam killers.
But the government refused to go public until every shred of doubt was crushed under the weight of hard forensic proof. Multiple media outlets had begun linking the two incidents, but the official word was withheld until there was a foolproof match.
As Defence Minister Rajnath Singh opened the debate on Operation Sindoor in Parliament, a high-stakes encounter was underway in Lidwas, near Srinagar. A joint team of the Army, CRPF, and Jammu and Kashmir police had identified a terrorist hideout after weeks of intercepting chatter. In the firefight that followed, three terrorists were taken down. Among the recovered arms were sophisticated assault rifles and rifle grenades.
Media reports, attributing sources in the government, said that Shah monitored the forensic verification process throughout Monday night.
Reports have added that he stayed up until 5 am, communicating via phone and video calls with scientists at the Chandigarh Forensic Science Laboratory as they conducted ballistic tests to match bullet casings and weapons recovered after the operation.
He caught only a few hours of sleep before heading to Parliament for what he knew would be a consequential announcement.
Security forces had earlier arrested several local residents suspected of aiding the terrorists. These individuals were brought in to identify the bodies of the slain terrorists. They confirmed that the three killed in Mahadev were indeed the perpetrators of the Pahalgam slaughter. But even this was deemed insufficient by the government. They demanded a scientific, unassailable confirmation.
Weapons seized during Operation Mahadev were flown out of Srinagar to Chandigarh aboard a special aircraft. An Air Force cargo plane was dispatched to bring in a specific machine from Ahmedabad for the tests. At the Chandigarh lab, test-firing was conducted using the recovered weapons. The bullet casings produced were then compared to those recovered from Baisaran Valley.
During this critical process, Shah remained in constant contact with the forensic scientists until the final report landed on his desk. It was during these experiments that the scientists reportedly informed Shah that the last time the terrorists’ weapons—an M9 and two AK-47s—had been fired was during the Pahalgam carnage.
Addressing the Lok Sabha during the Operation Sindoor debate, he declared with full authority, “There is no room for doubt. I am holding the ballistic report, six scientists have cross-checked it and confirmed to me over video call that the bullets fired at Pahalgam and the bullets fired from these guns are a 100 per cent match.”
For three months after the Pahalgam attack, the terrorists—Suleiman, Afghani, and Jibran—all Pakistani nationals—remained in hiding. They couldn’t escape, thanks to a meticulously executed strategy conceived hours after the massacre when the Home Minister flew to Kashmir. Sources, reports claimed, said that Shah made it crystal clear that these terrorists must not succeed in returning to Pakistan.
Security agencies identified an 8-km stretch likely to be used by the terrorists to flee and heavily fortified the area. Secret infiltration tunnels were located and excavated, then flooded to render them unusable. This sealed off all escape routes for the terrorists.
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