The Jammu and Kashmir police on Friday shot down a hexacopter drone carrying an improvised explosive device (IED) weighing five kgs near the International Border (IB) in the Akhnoor area of Jammu district.
Additional Director General Police (ADGP), Jammu, Mukesh Singh, said a hexacopter carrying a payload of five kg IED material was shot down in Akhnoor.
“The police had a specific input that Jaish-e-Mohammad was planning to drop a payload through a drone near Akhnoor. The IED material was packed and it was almost a ready-made IED just to be triggered by connecting a few wire,” he told reporters in Jammu.
Singh said that preliminary analysis suggested that it was a hexacopter with six wings fitted with a flight controller and a GPS. “The threads of the latest drone are the same as that of the ones used for dropping payloads at Indian Air Force (IAF) station, Jammu on June 27,” the ADGP revealed.
Since the twin blasts on the IAF station in Jammu, several drones were spotted in the last one month on multiple locations in Jammu, raising the threat of a drone attack. “The serial number of the flight controller used in the latest drone is just one digit different from the one that was earlier shot down at Akhnoor some time ago,” he said.
The initial investigations into twin drone terror attacks on the IAF base in Jammu on June 27 have also revealed that some elements of the Pakistan army helped the LeT in fabricating the ‘pressure fuse’ which triggered the explosion.
ADGP Singh said that the latest drone shot down was an assembled one with its parts manufactured from Taiwan and Hong-Kong. “It seems that the Jaish has assembled many drones with the same series,” he said.
The ability of drones to evade radar, wreak devastation at strategic installations and transport weapons to terrorists has become a new concern for the country’s security establishment.
Of late Pakistan has been procuring armed drones from China and Turkey. Since 2020, there has been a spurt in airdropping of weapons by drones and the smuggling of narcotics along the border in Jammu.
Over 325 drones have been sighted along the border with Pakistan since 2019.