Jaimal Singh, the driver of the bus which was hit by suicide attack in Pulwama on February 14, 2019, was not supposed to drive that day and had come in place of another colleague.
This is stated in a new book. Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Danesh Rana is currently the Additional Director General of Police in Jammu and Kashmir.
He has authored a book titled 'Edge for the Edge of the Saffron Field' on the incidents related to the Pulwama attack, in which the conspiracy behind the attack has been mentioned. 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were martyred in the attack.
Based on personal interviews with the conspirators, police charge sheets and other evidence, Rana, while outlining the modern face of terrorism in Kashmir, recalled the sequence of events of February 14, 2019, how the CRPF personnel traveling in the convoy The soldiers started arriving before the reporting time, before dawn.
As per the rules, head constable Jaimal Singh was among the last to reach along with the other drivers. Drivers always report last.
They are allowed an extra half an hour to sleep as they have to travel hard. Rana wrote, 'Jaimal Singh was not supposed to drive that day, he had come in the place of another colleague.'
Jaipal Singh got his duty on that day, a book published by HarperCollins India said, "Head constable Kripal Singh, a resident of Chamba, Himachal Pradesh, had applied for leave as his daughter was about to get married soon."
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Kripal was already handed over a bus with registration number HR49F-0637 and was asked by the supervising officer to go on leave after returning to Jammu. After this Jaimal Singh got the responsibility of taking the bus.
The information about the change of duty was given to the wife on the phone, Rana writes, 'He was an experienced driver and had driven several times on Highway 44.
He was familiar with its slopes, bends and cuts. Late on the night of 13 February, he called his wife in Punjab and told her about the last minute change of duty.
This was their last conversation. The jawans also included constable Thaka Belkar of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra.
Her family had just arranged her marriage and all the preparations were going on. Belkar applied for leave, but just 10 days before her wedding, she found her name on the list of passengers of a bus going to Kashmir.
Rana writes, 'But as soon as the convoy was about to leave, luck favored it. His leave was approved at the last minute! He quickly got off the bus and smiled and waved his hand at his colleagues and said goodbye.
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Little did he know that this would be the last time. Apart from Jaimal Singh's blue bus, the unusually long convoy had 78 other vehicles, including 15 trucks, two olive green buses belonging to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, an extra bus, a recovery van and an ambulance. were involved.
After the Pulwama attack, the NIA, which was entrusted with the investigation, was not able to connect the links of the incident. Although preliminary investigations based on forensic and other scientific evidence yielded some clues, these were not enough to understand who the perpetrators were.
When it appeared that the NIA investigation had stalled, the agency found a damaged mobile phone from an encounter site where two Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists were killed.
The recovered phones had an integrated GPS that geotagged the images, revealing the date, time and location of the photographs and videos. The discovery of this phone opened the mystery of the Pulwama case.