On Thursday, a white pigeon raised security concerns in the state of Punjab causing a flutter among intelligence sleuths and the Punjab Police.
The pigeon was spotted on Wednesday by a local in a village in Pathankot and had a Urdu stamp that read “Tehsil Shakargarh, district Narowal” on its tail.
Shakargarh is a tehsil in Narowal district in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
The white pigeon also reportedly had a wire-like object on its body.Â
This comes two days after an Intelligence Bureau (IB) alert to Punjab Police on the possibility of Indian Mujahideen being active in Jammu and Pathankot areas.Â
The cops took the bird to a veterinary hospital in Pathankot for an X-ray. This did not throw up any clues.
Pathankot senior superintendent of police (SSP) Rakesh Kaushal said, nothing adverse has been found, but we have kept the bird in our custody.
Cops at Bamiyal police post made a diary entry terming the bird as a “suspected spy”, and sent a communication to BSF and IB.
The incident has come just two months after a pigeon was spotted near the Pakistan border in Gujarat with a chip on its leg and an Urdu message stamped on it. Nothing conclusive had come from the investigation of that bird.
Birds have come to be used by terror groups as ‘suicide bombers’, with a case recently in Afghanistan, when a bird fitted with explosives and a GPS tracker exploded after it was shot by police in December.