Ghulam Mohammad, a school teacher, and Hassan, an army labourer, have been arrested on charges of spying in Batalik so far. A special police team, headed by assistant sub-inspector Kanwal Krishan, arrested them with eight bundles of dynamite and two metres of special detonator wire, called cordex.

The rest are now under watch. ``All these people are being kept under close surveillance,'' said P C Gupta, Deputy Inspector General (DIG), Ladakh.

The Army was quick to notice that something was amiss. ``Take, for example, the shelling ofthe underground ammunition dump on Baru Hills in Kargil on May 9,'' pointed out a senior Army officer posted in the Kargil sector. ``The first few shells fell at a harmless distance. Then a little while later, they began falling closer and closer, ultimately hitting the dump and destroying it completely,'' he added.

Among the other buildings and installations destroyed were the residences of Superintendent of Police (SP) Deepak Kumar and District Commissioner (DC) Shaleen Kabra. Then it was the SP's office yesterday. Other accurate hits were the offices of Ration and Clothing Depot and a fuel dump of the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) at Khurbatang Plateau. It was so badly damaged that it had to be shifted out of Kargil. The shells also hit the office of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP). ``It is apparent that the targets were not hit in random shelling but near-precision shelling,'' DIG Gupta said.

Explaining the modus operandi of the OPs, Gupta said they provided porters to the Army to carrysupplies to the forward posts. From them they gathered information about locations and, in turn, supplied it to Pakistan, enabling it to go for its targets accurately.

The Army official confirmed the presence of professional OPs in Drass, Kargil and Batalik. ``Artillery guns can basically be targeted at a general area and not a specific one. But our experience, especially since May 6, leaves us in no doubt that the fire is being specifically directed towards a target they know about,'' he said.

The state police have now geared up their local intelligence network to counter the OPs. The police have set up a counter-intelligence unit -- the Special Task Force (STF) -- at Drass. ``We have information that the occupation of heights in Drass by the infiltrators is basically intended to generate insurgency in the area. Therefore, we have set up an STF unit, backed by a component of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). It's work is to generate operational intelligence besides search and surveillancemissions,'' the DIG explained.