The data suggests that the attackers left Gharot village around Sunday night. The GPS has been sent for detailed forensic examination.
Preliminary investigations into the Gurdaspur terror strike indicate that the three suspected Lashker-e-Taiba militants had entered the country through Bamiyal village in Pathankot, located close to the international border.
Based on the date from the two GPS systems recovered from the dead attackers, investigators have claimed that all the terrorists started their journey from Gharot village near Shakargarh town in Pakistan. The group then crossed a tributary of the Ravi river, and headed to the village of Bamiyal on the Indian side of the border.
From Bamiyal, the group boarded an early morning bus that took them to the highway 1A, which links Punjab with Jammu and Kashmir and on to Hiranagar, passing several police checkpoints along the way.
The data suggests that the attackers left Gharot village around Sunday night. The GPS has been sent for forensic examination.
Three civilians and four security personnel, including a superintendent of police, were killed early Monday when three heavily-armed terrorists said to be from Pakistan went on a killing spree, shattering two decades of calm in Punjab and sparking an 11-hour gun battle that left all three attackers dead.
It took several hours for Punjab Police commandos to eliminate the terrorists who, in military fatigues, stormed a police station complex in Dinanagar town in Gurdaspur district, once a hotbed of militancy and adjoining Pakistan, taking security forces by surprise.
Dinanagar is located barely 15 km from the Pakistan border.
Punjab Director General of Police Sumedh Singh Saini told the media: “We (Punjab Police) engaged them and killed all three terrorists. We lost four security personnel. The terrorists were well armed with good firearms and good ammunition and were carrying GPS sets.”
This was the first major terror attack in Punjab after the assassination of then chief minister Beant Singh on August 31, 1995 in Chandigarh, joint capital of Punjab and Haryana.
The bloody saga began at 5.30 a.m. and ended by 4.30 p.m. when the police took back the entire police complex, which included the police station and residential quarters which were quickly emptied once the attack started.
The final assault by the SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team of Punjab Police on the complex ended with intermittent firing and grenade attacks from both sides. A Home Guard jawan survived the 11-hour ordeal and ran out of one of the complex when the operation ended.
