Behind the grenade attacks in Punjab, poverty, promises of visas, transnational gangs & ISI imprint
They had allegedly lobbed grenades at the residence of a Congress leader in Amritsar’s Jaintipur area on 15 January, and near the residence of a police officer at Batala’s Raimal village on 17 February.
Later, Mohit was killed when police retaliated allegedly in self-defence after he opened fire.
The two cases were not one-off incidents. In December, Abhijot Singh, along with Shubham, Kuljit Singh, Rohit alias Ghessi, and Gurjinder Singh alias Raja, were arrested in connection with the grenade attacks on a police station in Batala and a police post in Gurdaspur. The two cases were reported on 12 and 20 December. All the arrested men are from Batala’s Qila Lal Singh village.
Though Jasbir Kaur rues sending her only son to Armenia last year only to be tortured by an agent there, the police have an altogether different story about Abhijot: the mastermind of the attacks on police post at Gurdaspur met a close aide of wanted gangster Harpreet Singh, alias Happy Pashian, during his time in Armenia and got on board with the sinister plan to target police in border areas.
In over three months since December, more than a dozen youths from border police districts, such as Batala and Amritsar Rural, as well as Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar, have been arrested on the charges of attacking police stations and posts at the behest of foreign-based gangsters linked to banned terror outfits, such as the Khalistan Zindabad Force (KZF) and the Babbar Khalsa International (BKI).
There have been 12 incidents of explosives or grenades thrown by bike-borne assailants in areas, such as Amritsar, Gurdaspur and Batala, as well as one incident in Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar in a little over two months. The latest such case was reported 14 March, when two men on a motorcycle hurled some explosive at a temple in Amritsar’s Khandwala area.
What catches the eye is that most of these arrested men did not have criminal antecedents before they were booked on serious charges under the Explosive Substances Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, or UAPA.
According to sources in the Punjab Police, these young men were lured on the promise of a few thousand rupees and a potential visa to foreign countries. The current trend of deploying young men without criminal records underlines a pattern, they added.
“Nearly all of them had no criminal cases, thereby not coming under the scanner of intelligence from the outset. This increases their chances of escaping the law enforcement agencies before the attack is much higher compared to hardened criminals,” a senior police officer said.
Both Vishal and Mohit were part of a terror module, allegedly run by gangster Pashian on the directions of Pakistan’s spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), according to the police. Wanted in at least 29 cases, including several under the UAPA, Pashian is said to have shifted base to the US, and has become an asset for BKI’s Pakistan-based head Harvinder Singh Sandhu, alias Rinda.
“All top gangsters are either sitting abroad or are running operations from jail, which are not entirely under surveillance. The recruitment of young men with clean records allows them to carry out their objective without risking the bigger fish,” another officer said.
Trip to Armenia & fellow villager in Oman
In the late evening of 15 January, three men on a bike reached near the residence of Congress leader Amandeep Jaintipur and one of them lobbed a grenade at the house, though he and his family members were not present at the time.
Amandeep’s late father Rajinder Kumar aka Pappu Jaintipur dabbled in politics and had a liquor manufacturing business. About two weeks before the grenade attack, Amandeep had approached the police that he had received an extortion call on WhatsApp from a number with UK code. The caller identified themselves as gangster Pashian and gangster-turned-terrorist ‘Rinda’, he had said.
Later, a case was lodged against Pashian, Rinda, along with unknown suspects, under relevant sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Explosives Substances Act. Police officers privy to the case investigation told ThePrint that the module was organised and funded allegedly by Ravinder Singh from Mohit’s village Buddhe di Khui. Ravinder transferred Rs 25,000 to Vishal as part of the plot, they said.
“Ravinder has been living in Muscat on a work visa for the last three years and came to India in January. Mohit was brought on board (to carry out the plan) by his cousin Rajveer Singh,” a police officer told ThePrint, adding that he returned to Muscat shortly after this grenade attack, but continued to operate the module from abroad.
Nearly a month later, the trio carried out a similar act near the residence of a Punjab police officer’s relative at Gurdaspur’s Raimal village on 17 February. “The CCTV footage from the site had a similar pattern that was noticed in the case reported at Amandeep’s house,” a senior police officer said.
Later, Batala Police arrested the mother of Ravinder, alleging that she was aware of the plot hatched by her son from Muscat.
The attack was presumably, according to the police officer, carried out to bolster the “narrative” of the Punjab Police itself coming under attack from foreign-based gangsters.
On the other hand, Mohit’s father Jaspal confirmed that Ravinder visited their house in January and lamented that his son did not heed his warning to avoid bad company.
“Ravinder was never a good character. I always heard his name for the wrong reasons and wanted my son to focus on work. He was learning to drive and could have got a driver’s job to keep the expenses going,” Jaspal told ThePrint outside his house.
The distraught father alleged that Mohit was killed in a “staged” encounter. “We were not informed of the encounter by Police, and rather, we got to know through social media,” he said.
Not more than 10 km away, Jasbir Kaur lamented how she mortgaged her property to send her son Abhijot to Armenia only to be duped and tortured by agents there. In fact, the police confirmed that Abhijot had travelled to Armenia last year for a brief period, but added that there he met a close associate of gangster Pashian and BKI operatives.
“Abhijot was the mastermind behind the two attacks in Batala and Gurdaspur aided by four others from the same village,” Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) Border Range Satinder Singh told ThePrint.
Though she claimed that she was completely unaware of the terror plot mentioned by the police, Jasbir Kaur confirmed to ThePrint that all the five arrested men knew each other as they were from the same locality.
At her house in Qila Lal Singh village, the middle-aged woman said her son reached Armenia to earn livelihood on the promise of a local agent. Abhijot was tortured by agents instead, she said.
“He was beaten up to surrender his passport so that he could not return on his own volition. He was tortured and harassed. After a stay of two months and a complaint with local police, he managed to return to India,” Kaur told ThePrint.
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First ‘serious’ offence, poor families—a common theme
A similar link emerged wherein a terror module comprising Lovepreet, Karandeep and Buta Singh was busted in the probe into the blast near the Fatehgarh Churian police post on the Amritsar bypass in the late evening of 3 February.
Coming from a family of daily wagers, Karandeep worked as a mechanic in the Majithia area. While Lovepreet earned livelihood as a carpenter in Amritsar, his mother travelled daily to the city to work as a housemaid. Both the men were from Jagdev Kalan.
Police identified Buta Singh as the contact through which Pashian reached out to Karandeep and Lovepreet. Buta’s brother, they said, was a one-time roommate of the now US-based gangster Pashian in Dubai.
Subsequently, the two module members came in contact with Pashian over encrypted applications.
As part of the plan, bike-borne Lovepreet and Karandeep lobbed the grenade from the flyover passing from above the post, for which the former received Rs 30,000, and the latter got Rs 20,000. “The duo was seen, in CCTV footage, around Khanna Paper mill a few kilometres from the crime scene. The speed of their bike triggered suspicion,” a police officer told ThePrint.
In the two modules busted by Batala Police, all accused belonged to families of daily wage labourers. All nine accused barring Rohit alias Ghessi from Qila Lal Singh had no criminal case against them. Rohit was booked in a theft case in June last year.
Of the three accused arrested for the Fatehgarh Churian bypass blast, Lovepreet only faced a case before—he was booked under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, commonly known as the NDPS Act, in November 2023.
“Because of their financial background, a few thousand rupees or allurement of visa arrangements to foreign countries is a compelling deal to bring them on board. They are neither aware of the fallout of their acts, nor have any training for radicalisation. They are provided ammunition and instructions from sources completely unknown to them which they carry out in the hope of going abroad,” a Punjab Police officer said.
Minimal human contact
On the morning of 2 December last year, an Assistant Sub Inspector (ASI)-level officer posted at the Asron police post in Shaheed Bhagat Singh (SBS) Nagar district spotted a hand grenade. The message was forwarded to the top officers and on the same day, an FIR was registered.
Around a fortnight later, Director General of Police (DGP) Gaurav Yadav claimed a terror module run by the banned outfit KZF was unearthed with the arrest of Yugpreet Singh alias Yuvi, Jaskaran Singh alias Shah, and Harjot Singh alias Jot.
The trio—all residents of Rahon town of SBS Nagar—were identified as the members of this module which was being run from Pakistan, the DGP said.
Shahbaz Singh of Rahon, according to the police, worked as a conduit between the arrested accused and their KZF handlers.
“Accused were in contact with Shahbaz Singh, who later introduced them to Jagjit Singh, a resident of Punjab and British soldier who has masterminded these attacks at the behest of KZF,” a Punjab Police officer told ThePrint.
Serving in the British Army as Lance Corporal, Jagjit Singh has several pseudonyms such as Hari Singh, Lakhwinder Singh Lakha, Hari Singh, Fateh Singh Baagi, and Harjas Singh and was allegedly the KZF’s brain behind the 2 December SBS Nagar grenade lobbing as well as 18 December attack on a police post in Gurdaspur. Having moved to the UK in 2010, Singh allegedly joined the British Army in 2023—a claim the British Army denies.
This case was an example of “minimal” man-to-man contact between people running these modules and the accused, the police said, explaining that the arrested trio had picked up a hand grenade from a dead letter box—a remote location selected to pass materials without the two parties having to meet in persons—at the GT Road in Jalandhar on 28 November.
The KZF is alleged to have pumped Rs 45 lakh over six months leading up to the Nawashehr attack.
“Neither in this case nor the cases worked out so far that the accused had any inkling of the people who sent them consignment. There was no to negligible communication between accused persons arrested and people funding them and facilitating them with weapons and ammunition,” another Punjab Police officer told ThePrint.
ISI’s tactics
Of all the links connecting the 12 cases worked out by the Punjab Police with the help of central agencies, the most significant has been the imprint of ISI, sources in the security establishment told ThePrint.
“There has to be involvement of a state actor for gangsters to have military equipment such as grenades and RDX used in IEDs, which were recovered in some cases. There would not have been such an alarming frequency of activities carried out by these groups in a short period with a similar pattern (if not for the ISI’s clandestine support),” a source explained.
“Both BKI and KZF are involved in attacks on police installations, while gangsters such as Arsh Dalla have been involved in attacks on businesses, such as the grenade attack at a petrol pump in Mansa. The cohesion of these groups in carrying out similar activities and in nearly the same way suggest a common brain (read, ISI).”
For years, Pakistan has been using Punjab as for transit of drugs, which it was looking to continue even now with more sophisticated tactics such as drones, the sources asserted.
“Pakistan has employed professionals to run drone sorties at specific locations for which they pay approximately Rs 50,000 for each successful delivery. The young people, who are part of the modules, are instructed to receive and deliver arms and ammunition as a barter for drugs they get to sell and earn money,” another officer told ThePrint. “The deployment of drones for delivery of arms and drugs have made border fencing nearly redundant.”
Moreover, forensic analysis of nearly all ammunition and explosives and its traces recovered from the site of the series of these recent blasts confirms it to have been sent from across the border from Punjab, the sources in the security establishment said.
“These consignments have been dropped through drones in less than a year, and we have been able to assess a majority of them so far,” a senior officer said.
Punjab shares more than 400 km-long international border with Pakistan, that runs along the districts of Pathankot, Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Ferozepur, and Fazilka.
“As part of its goal of reviving militancy in Punjab, ISI is testing waters with different strategies to sow seeds of disaffection, trigger unrest and disturb overall law and order in Punjab. So, we can see a spate of targets after a brief lull. There were attacks against police installations in the past, too. The concern now is about their frequencies and the use of youths as dispensable foot soldiers,” a Punjab Police officer explained.
“The attacks on police installations is a message to the extortion targets that if police establishments are not safe, then how vulnerable they are without coughing up money.”
(Edited by Tony Rai)
