Forty CRPF jawans were killed after an explosive-laden vehicle rammed into a convoy in south Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14.Days before the NIA zeroed in on the owner of the Maruti car that was used to target a convoy in Pulwama killing 40 CRPF men on February 14, the agency and a team of experts from Maruti had hit a wall.
They had concluded that the car was manufactured in 2011 and after analysing parts of the car recovered from the blast site, whittled the number of vehicles to sift through to 2,500. On February 20, an NIA team was sent back to Pulwama to scan a radius of 200 metres around the attack site with metal detectors. The result: Investigators found the car's key.
Hours later, the team reached the first owner of the Maruti Eeco and soon announced that Anantnag resident and Jaish recruit Sajjad Bhat had bought the car ten days before the attack.
On February 14, at around 3.30 pm a red Maruti Eeco car driven by alleged Jaish operative Adil Ahmed Dar sped alongside the CRPF convoy on the Jammu-Srinagar highway at Lethpora in Pulwama. Moments later it exploded near a bus killing 40 CRPF men. The impact of the blast was such that the bus had been reduced to a heap of mangled metal and the car had almost disappeared.
READ | First leads in Pulwama probe: Car was 2010-11 make, repainted
NIA investigators along with Jammu and Kashmir police and forensic experts scanned the site for days to gather clues on the owner of the vehicle….
