NSG still trying to deal with IED menace: Director-General

At a time when IEDs remain a “weapon of choice” for elements like Naxals, extremists and terrorists to perpetrate violence, the NSG lost an experienced counter-IED officer to a deadly booby trap in the Pathankot terror attack as the terrorists used an innovative technique whose antidote was not included in the Standard Operating Procedure of the elite counter-terror force.

The NSG on Thursday rued the fact that security agencies dealing with the menace of IEDs and similar local bombs are still “groping’’ with the challenge of detecting their presence and triggering mechanisms.

After losing the “brilliant” officer Lt. Col. Niranjan EK, the force has now decided to revise its Standard Operating Procedures for defusing bombs and Improvised Explosive Devices, a senior NSG official said on Thursday.

“Recently, we had an incident at Pathankot where a grenade was used as a booby trap and unfortunately, NSG lost one of its brilliant officers. In this case, everything that was there in the SOP was followed but the terrorists used an innovative thing which somehow was not included in the SOP and that perhaps led to this unfortunate incident.”

“We are now revising our SOPs. We have learnt our lessons and we will incorporate (new things). The scope for improvement is always there. No one can say that the SOP or the procedure which is prescribed right now cannot be improved. Once we have this experience, we keep on updating these SOPs,” the director-general of NSG, Mr R.C. Tayal said while addressing an international seminar on combating the menace of IEDs.

The NSG director-general, however, maintained that Niranjan, an experienced and highly-trained Commanding Officer of the Bomb Disposal and Detection Unit, had followed all laid-down SOPs while sanitising the bodies of the four terrorists, killed in the attack on an IAF base on January 3.

“He (Niranjan) followed the SOP,” he said vouching for his competence and professional acumen.

The NSG chief also rued that a number of state police forces do not have the “basic equipment” to counter IEDs.

According to senior officials of the NSG bomb data centre, Niranjan was probably the only officer who had a wide-range of experience in conducting back-to-back anti-sabotage and sanitisation checks on live bombs, including defusing IEDs found in Patna and Bodh Gaya in Bihar, Bangalore and Burdwan in West Bengal.

The D-G said a grenade that took the FBI-trained officer’s life was concealed very cleverly by the terrorists. The brave officer had sanitised two bodies and was working on the third when the fatal blast claimed his life.

Meanwhile, the NSG chief made a strong pitch for regulating the usage of electronic detonators and said the legal regime needs to be made more “rigorous.” He also flagged the “contentious” issue of regulating the sale and distribution of electronic detonators used for mining and similar operations in the country, which are also used to trigger IED blasts.

“All IED blasts that occurred last year in the country were conducted by the use of electronic detonators. It is desirable to restrict and regulate their use. It is not possible to have a blanket ban on its usage as it is used in mining but there has to be a federal policy on this,” he said.

IEDs, which claimed 75 lives in the country last year, have been keeping the security agencies on their toes for many years with little headway made into finding ways to detect them and defuse them effectively to save lives of security personnel.