Three years since Pulwama attack

Team Udayavani, Feb 14, 2022, 1:22 PM IST

On February 14, 2022, it will be three years since the Pulwama incident, in which 40 CRPF members were killed when a 22-year-old suicide bomber slammed an IED-laden truck into the security convoy carrying them, making it the Valley’s deadliest attack during the insurgency’s 30-year history. A look back at the events that transpired.

How India Responded to Pulwama Attack

PM Modi stated that the security forces have been given carte blanche in terms of when, where, and how they respond to the terror incident in Pulwama.

“All tears will be avenged” and the armed forces have been given “full freedom to decide the place, time, intensity and nature of the retaliation against the enemy.

“I feel the same fire in my heart that’s raging inside you,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said. Nationwide protests erupted against the terror attack.

In the early hours of February 26, twelve days after the incident, Indian Air Force jets targeted the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) camp in Balakot, Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. India also made extensive diplomatic efforts to have JeM chief Masood Azhar designated as a global terrorist, which became a reality on May 1, 2019, when China lifted its technical hold on a proposal introduced by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in the UN Security Council’s 1267 Committee.

In August 2020, the National Investigation Agency filed a 13,500-page chargesheet in a special court against 19 persons, including Azhar, for planning and carrying out a devastating suicide assault on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama, South Kashmir, that killed 40 people in 2019.

Officials said the NIA cracked the “blind case” by piecing together electronic evidence and testimony from terrorists and their sympathisers detained in separate cases.

On the two-year anniversary of the assault, authorities claimed that a significant terrorist plot to detonate an explosive device in a crowded area was foiled by the seizure of a strong IED from a nursing student who was caught with three others.