The shift in the strategy of Pakistan sponsored terror outfits of inducting pistol carrying hybrid terrorists to target civilians in Jammu and Kashmir has taken with surprise the security forces that are trying to find a way to counter the new problem.

The killing of civilians has generated anger among common people that were visible in Srinagar and Jammu on Friday during the cremation of the school principal Supinder Kaur and teacher Deepak Chand when people raised slogans against the terror outfits and also criticized the administration for having failed to protect the civilians.

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Members of the Sikh community staged a sit-in protest near Srinagar’s civil secretariat when the body of Supinder Kaur was being taken for cremation. Similar protests were witnessed in Jammu during the funeral of Deepak Chand.

The killing of civilians has created embarrassment for the administration and more so for the security forces that had so far maintained an upper hand by neutralizing several top commanders of various terrorist outfits during the current year. Terrorists armed with AK-47 assault rifles were identifiable even in busy market places as the weapon could not be concealed but the dilemma now being faced by the security forces is that the unlisted hybrid terrorists carrying pistols mingle with the crowds to shoot any soft target and then get lost. A police officer was recently shot dead with a pistol in downtown Srinagar.

Reports say that the three terrorists who shot the woman principal and a male teacher of a government school in the Eidgah locality of Srinagar on Thursday had made the teachers line up and segregated the two who did not belong to a particular community and fired at them with pistols.

What has been witnessed in recent months is that the security forces recover pistols more than AK-47 rifles from the terrorists killed during encounters. More than 203 pistols and about 152 AK rifles were recovered from terrorists during the past few months.

A police officer some time back claimed that Srinagar has been made almost free of terrorists. Only four terrorists were active in Srinagar and efforts were being made to neutralize them, he said.

The intelligence set up was trying to identify the freshly radicalized hybrid terrorists whose weapon of attack is a pistol. Most killings of civilians and unarmed policemen in Kashmir have reportedly been done by newly recruited terrorists. A terrorist who had picked up the gun just a couple of days ago was neutralized in a recent encounter.

The J&K DGP Dilbag Singh recently said that pistols were being flown to terrorists from Pakistan by drones. The BSF on Thursday recovered a cache of arms and ammunition, including four pistols, along the Pakistan border in the Samba sector of Jammu.