SRINAGAR: A Military Intelligence (MI) officer talking about “, exacting intelligence war” in Kashmir to newspaper Hindustan Times and offered an instance of how a young lady two-timed by her rebel lover got him dead and eventually was hanged. The officer Colonel Bipin Pathak has recently retired in Chandigarh after a long experience of operations in Jammu and Kashmir and North-East.
“He talked to me about the brutal, exacting intelligence war in Kashmir,” Colonel told r Mandeep Singh Bajwa, a freelancer who is doing a fortnightly column for the newspaper. “There was the case of Iram (not her real name) who was so infatuated with Tamim, a top Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) commander, a Pakistani that her anger knew no bounds upon learning that he was two-timing her.. Her revenge was to give him up to military intelligence. It was agreed that she would inform the Army about her next meeting with the Pakistani. A simple code involving the number of rings on a cellphone would identify the location where the tryst was to take place.”
The report said that the army raid was successful and resulted in the killing of Tamim with two of his colleagues. “Our heroine was unfortunately unmasked by her spending pattern and was hanged from a tree by the terrorists to set an example,” the report said. “To locate security forces’ sources, they (militants) look for villagers doing conspicuous consumption – purchase of luxuries, electronic items, vehicles, jewellery, clothes or repaying loans.”
The intelligence sleuth has said that like security men, militants also carry out “comprehensive postmortems on operations to identify chinks in their own security and informers”. They also “lure security forces into ambushes by their comrades by pretending to surrender”.
“The favoured method is to snatch weapons and run into per-designated killing areas with security forces personnel in hot pursuit,” the report quoting the officer said. “Therefore, the Army insists on accepting surrenders only in their own camps. Another ploy, according to Bipin is to direct the security forces to what are supposed to be weapons caches which actually have improvised explosive devices (IEDs) implanted.”
