Anatomy of an attack: Missed clues, lax security and wasted time in run-up to raid on Indian air base

The hijacking of an Indian police officer’s car by gunmen disguised in uniform should have set off alarm bells and helped prevent a deadly weekend attack on a military air base, officials and security experts said.

His colleagues’ slowness to react was one of several security lapses in the buildup to the pre-dawn raid, blamed by India on Pakistani militants and a blow to the recent improvement in ties between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

Three days on from an assault that killed seven military personnel and wounded 22, five attackers have also been eliminated, but an operation was still under way to secure the sprawling compound in northwestern Punjab state that lies 25km from the border with Pakistan.

Police Superintendent Salwinder Singh’s call to a colleague in the early hours of Friday morning, after his car was hijacked, was at first treated as a case of armed robbery, the officer who answered the phone said.

“The truth is that we did not take Singh's complaint seriously, because his record has not been clean,” a second senior officer in the Punjab police said, on condition of anonymity.

The police sources said Singh had just been transferred after a woman constable filed a sexual harassment case against him. Singh, who was interrogated on Monday for six hours by federal investigators, could not be reached for comment.