The same evening, at 6 p.m., Babar tried but could not contact Abu-Lakhvi via satellite or mobile phone. Finally, he called up Abu-Lakhvi’s aide Ibrahim from a PCO near the safehouse. Babar told him about the proposed attack on the CRPF base. He asked Ibrahim to seek Abu-Lakhvi’s approval and get a date for the attack. He also explained why he had chosen the CRPF base as the target and not an army convoy passing through Bareilly, as originally planned.

Ibrahim called Babar back around midnight. Abu-Lakhvi had approved the attack on the CRPF base and wanted it to happen early on 1 January 2008, at 2 a.m., he informed Babar.

Babar’s use of a PCO to talk to Ibrahim, rather than a satellite or mobile phone, meant that the crucial conversation on the date and time of the attack was not intercepted by the CTC, which had been keenly listening in on identified mobile and satellite communications. So, while the CTC was aware that the LeT would be unleashing a fidayeen attack on the CRPF base thanks to the intercepted satellite and mobile communications between Babar and Abu-Lakhvi, Abu-Muzammil, Al-Wali, Sohrab and Janbaaz, they did not know the details. The talks included references to renting a house in Pilibhit, a trip to Bareilly and Pilibhit, and stray references to ‘group HQ’ and ‘Yashwantri Marg’. But the exact time and date of the attack was not known and that was a gaping hole in the information they had about the impending attack.

Nonetheless, they had enough to go on for Shekhar to send an alert to the top brass of the Uttar Pradesh police. He asked that the security forces undertake all adequate precautions to foil the attack. In response, a police control room van with armed personnel was deployed outside the CRPF base.

At 2 a.m. on 1 January 2008, the two fidayeen emerged out of the bushes across the road from the CRPF base on the opposite side of Yashwantri Mandir Marg. They crossed the road, their rucksacks on their shoulders, and walked towards the entrance of the base. One of them, Shabbir, walked ahead and, when around twenty feet away from the entrance, engaged a guard in conversation.

‘From where can we get a bus to Pilibhit?’ he asked. A lone UP police PCR van was stationed outside the CRPF base’s entrance gates but it was not clear, from where he stood, whether it was occupied at that point.

While the guard, who held an AK-47, was thinking of a response, Shabbir’s buddy fidayeen, Imran, opened fire from behind. The guard took a hail of bullets and slumped to the ground. The second guard, who stood across him, trained his INSAS 5.56 mm automatic rifle at the two attackers and pressed the trigger. In the same instant, however, the attackers dropped to the ground and fired back at the second guard. The second guard fell too.