When the first call reached the Pahalgam police control room at 2:45 p.m. on 22 April 2025, the attackers were already melting into the treeline. The meadow they had turned into a killing ground sits about seven kilometres from Pahalgam town in Anantnag district, ringed by dense pine forest on every side, accessible only on foot or horseback. Twenty-five tourists and one local Muslim pony-ride operator — Syed Adil Hussain Shah, who died trying to wrestle a rifle from one of the gunmen — were dead or dying.

The nearest CRPF base was a 40-minute trek away across muddy, rocky ground. By the time 25 paramilitary personnel arrived at 2:30 p.m. as first responders, the shooters were gone.

The geography was not kind to India. Baisaran Valley lies roughly 220 kilometres from the Line of Control. In the hours after the attack, the operational assumption inside Indian intelligence was stark: if the attackers reached Pakistan, they would never be brought to justice. Security forces received a single, uncompromising instruction — do not let them escape.

Operation Mahadev had begun.

The First Break: A Satellite Phone

The initial trail was thin. With no reliable identification of the shooters, Jammu and Kashmir Police and central intelligence agencies spent the first days piecing together eyewitness accounts, ballistic recovery from the Baisaran site, and technical signatures from South Kashmir’s mobile and communications networks.

The breakthrough came from an unexpected device: a Huawei satellite phone, IMEI 86761204-XXXXXX, pinging the Inmarsat-4 F1 satellite. From 22 April onwards, every transmission from that handset was logged. Operators did not yet know who was carrying it. They knew only that it had gone active in the hours after the massacre and was moving through the upper reaches of South Kashmir — first through Hapatnaar, then Bugam, then Tral.

By the end of May, a clearer operational picture had emerged. The terrorists were exploiting the difficult high-altitude terrain to evade capture. The annual Amarnath Yatra, which brings hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims through Kashmir each summer, was approaching — raising the possibility of a second atrocity if the shooters were not neutralised in time.

The response was to expand the operation dramatically. Additional forces, including elite PARA Special Forces units, were inducted. The search zone — initially over 300 square kilometres — was progressively compressed through continuous aerial and electronic surveillance.

The Tools of a Modern Hunt

What Operation Mahadev came to represent, officials later acknowledged, was a qualitative shift in how Indian counter-terror operations are fought in Kashmir. The old model — cordon-and-search sweeps by infantry, supplemented by informer networks — was augmented, and in some phases replaced, by a fused intelligence architecture.

Drones and unmanned aerial vehicles mapped movement patterns inside the Dachigam National Park and the Mahadev Ridge. Electro-optical sensors validated suspected positions without revealing the positions of Indian troops. Human intelligence — much of it gathered from shepherds, pony operators, and Gujjar families who had at various points been forced to provide food and shelter to the fugitives — was cross-referenced with the satellite phone’s movement log and with voice samples that would later be matched to a senior Lashkar-e-Taiba operator named Sajid Saifullah Jatt.

The Indian Army, Central Reserve Police Force, Border Security Force, and Jammu and Kashmir Police operated in seamless multi-agency coordination. By 3 August, joint counter-terror operations launched in the wake of Pahalgam had killed 21 terrorists across six separate confrontations in Jammu and Kashmir — nine local recruits and twelve Pakistani nationals. But the three most wanted men were still alive.

The Phone That Made One Call Too Many

On 26 July 2025, the satellite phone made what Indian intelligence sources later described as an “unusual call.” Red flags went up across the security grid.

By 10 July, based on fresh intelligence inputs, Operation Mahadev had already entered what officials called its decisive phase. Escape routes were systematically blocked. Troops were redeployed dynamically. The terrorists — now identified through voice analysis, ballistic matching, and eyewitness testimony as Suleiman Shah alias Faizal Jatt, Hamza Afghani, and Jibran Bhai, all three Pakistani nationals and all three senior Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives — were isolated inside a confined zone in the Harwan jungles near the Mahadev Ridge in Dachigam.

On the morning of 28 July, at around 8 a.m., a drone lifted off to gather visuals of the three men. Rashtriya Rifles and PARA Special Forces personnel climbed Mahadev hill under cover and took up positions around the suspected hideout. Three hours later, following visual confirmation, the team opened fire.

By 12:45 p.m., photographs were being taken of the bodies. A cleansing operation of the surrounding area followed. Security forces recovered two Kalashnikov-series rifles, one M4 carbine, significant quantities of ammunition and warlike supplies, three mobile phones, two communication sets, a GoPro body-camera harness, a 28-watt solar charger, and the Swiss-made satellite handset that had betrayed them.

Ninety-three days had elapsed since the Baisaran massacre.

The Forensic Confirmation

Identifying the shooters as the Pahalgam attackers, rather than merely three militants killed in a counter-insurgency operation, required evidence. India’s Home Minister Amit Shah presented that evidence to Parliament in the days after the encounter.

Ballistic analysis at the Central Forensic Science Laboratory showed that the striation patterns on the three AK-103 rifles recovered on Mahadev Ridge matched the 7.62×39mm casings found on the meadow at Baisaran. Voice samples taken from the recovered satellite phone matched audio attributed to the cell commander. A Gujjar family detained during the operation, which had provided food and shelter to the attackers at multiple points, identified the bodies brought to Srinagar. In September, Srinagar Police arrested 26-year-old Mohammad Yousuf Kataria — a seasonal teacher from Kulgam district who had supplied logistical support to the cell on at least four occasions in the Zabarwan hills. Forensic examination of a phone charger recovered from the operation proved vital to tracing him.

The evidentiary chain was closed. The three men killed on 28 July had been the three men in the meadow on 22 April.

What Closure Looks Like

For the families of the 26 victims — 25 Indian nationals and one Nepali, scattered from Shivamogga in Karnataka to Pune to Delhi — closure is not a concept that survives close examination. The cousin of Manjunath Rao, one of two Karnataka tourists killed at Baisaran, told reporters this week that the trauma remains etched in the family’s minds even as they try to move on with life. That arithmetic does not balance.

What Operation Mahadev offered instead was something narrower and more difficult to name. The men who walked out of the treeline on 22 April 2025 did not escape. They did not cross the Line of Control. They did not retire into Pakistani sanctuary to plan the next attack. They were found, identified, and neutralised on Indian soil, by Indian forces, using Indian intelligence, in 93 days.

Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, speaking this week, called the Pahalgam attack a major setback for the region. He is right. Tourism — the industry the attackers most explicitly sought to destroy — is only now, a year later, beginning to recover. The Kashmiri economy has absorbed losses that will take years to quantify.

But the operation that followed stands, on its own terms, as a defining example of what sustained counter-terror resolve looks like when intelligence, technology, and elite special forces are fused under a single unambiguous instruction. Baisaran Valley was silent yesterday. On Mahadev Ridge, so were the three men who made it that way.