Three weeks after the Pahalgam terror attack, an incident that pushed India and Pakistan to the brink of war, there appears to have been no progress in the investigation.

Despite the government’s admission of an “intelligence failure” behind the massacre, accountability has yet to be established.

The three Pakistani terrorists who killed 25 tourists and a local ponywallah are still on the run. They opened fire at tourists who were milling around eateries, taking pony rides or just picnicking at the unguarded Baisaran Valley, a popular meadow surrounded by dense forests in south Kashmir’s Pahalgam.

“The terrorists are still free and the security agencies have not been able to trace them. It speaks volumes about our crumbling internal intelligence gathering mechanism. What happened to the government’s vow to pursue the killers to the ends of the earth and punish them?” a military veteran told The Telegraph on Tuesday.

He added: “We have a huge deployment of security personnel in Jammu and Kashmir, including the Intelligence Bureau, military intelligence, police intelligence, besides electronic intelligence. When will the government fix responsibility for this grave security failure?”

A former Border Security Force director-general said such incidents would continue to recur “unless we urgently address the chinks and existing faultlines within our intelligence mechanism”.

“How could the terrorists cross the border and kill people at will in a region which has a huge presence of security personnel? We all know these terrorists are nurtured by Pakistan, and the precision attacks on the nine terror launchpads by our armed forces during Operation Sindoor were a welcome step. But we also need to set our house in order,” he said.

Addressing a rally in Bihar on April 27, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had vowed to pursue the terrorists “to the ends of the earth” and to “identify, trace and punish every terrorist and their backers”.

During an all-party meeting, the Opposition had questioned the government about security lapses behind the Pahalgam massacre and demanded a probe and the fixing of accountability. Sources said Union home minister Amit Shah, during the meeting, had acknowledged that there was a “security lapse”.

Major-general (retd) Yash Mor, who served as a Major in Pahalgam between 2001 and 2003, had earlier said: “We must accept there was intelligence failure at some
level. This is a big issue.... Where is accountability, be it Kargil, Pulwama, Uri or the Chinese intrusion into the Galwan Valley? Have we ever fixed accountability?”

A day after the Pahalgam attack, security agencies released the sketches of three men suspected to have carried out the carnage. They were identified as Asif Shaikh Fauji, Suleman Shah and Abu Talha, all believed to be operatives of The Resistance Front, a proxy of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, from Pakistan.

They had the code names Moosa, Yunus and Asif and were earlier involved in terror-related incidents in Poonch and had a history of orchestrating terror strikes in the region.

The sketches were prepared with the help of survivors’ testimonies.

The National Investigation Agency, which took over the probe from the Jammu and Kashmir police, has so far not given any official update on the progress of the investigation.