NEW DELHI, Dec 21: The Punjab Police have seized 11 hand grenades claimed to have been dropped by a Pakistani drone near the international border in Gurdaspur district.
The police said on Monday that the incident occurred on Saturday night when the Border Security Force personnel at the Chakri border outpost noticed a drone flung into Indian territory from the Pakistani side. It was immediately engaged and shot at both by the BSF and the Punjab police but it seemed to have managed to fly back to Pakistan after dropping its payload.
The police launched a search and found a plastic box with wooden frames containing the 11 hand grenades in a field in Salach village, about a kilometer from the Pakistan border.
The police said the recovered Austrian Arges Type HG 84 series anti-personnel fragmentation hand grenade were a conventional hand grenade system designed to inflict massive damage against soft targets within its blast radius, spraying shrapnel out to a distance of 30 meters at speed, the police said.
The first incident of dropping arms and weapons through drones from Pakistan came to light in Punjab in August 2019 when police recovered AK-47 rifles, magazines and rounds of ammunition, hand grenades, fake currency and other items in Tarn Taran district. Since then there have been several instances when security forces seized arms and ammunition dropped by drones flying in from across the Pakistani border.
(Manas Dasgupta)