New Delhi: Speaking in Lok Sabha on Tuesday (July 29), Union home minister Amit Shah said that the three militants, responsible for the terrorist attack on tourists in Kashmir’s Pahalgam on April 22, who were killed in Lidwas area of Srinagar a day earlier, were all residents of Pakistan. However, several questions still remain unanswered.Identified as Suleman alias Faizal Jutt, Afghan and Jibran, Shah said that two out of three were carrying “Pakistani voter numbers” and the chocolates recovered from their possession were also made in Pakistan.However, a government official told The Hindu that the three militants had entered India “around three years ago”. Why they kept the chocolates, purportedly purchased in Pakistan, in their possession for three years will continue to raise questions about the credibility of Shah’s claims in coming years.In Pakistan, citizens also don’t have voter ID numbers. Instead, the country issues a ‘Computerised National Identity Card’, similar to India’s Aadhaar card, which is used to open a bank account, draw a cheque if issued by someone else, for buying stamp papers, as well as at the time of voting.Shah was reacting to former Union home minister and senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram’s remarks in an interview regarding the identities of the militants involved in the Pahalgam attack. Samajwadi Party leader and former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav had also raised questions in the parliament about the timing of the encounter.However, Shah’s statement on the floor of the parliament appeared to differ from the claims made by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which has probed the Pahalgam terrorist attack.Recounting the aftermath of the attack, Shah said that a plan was put into place by the security forces including the army and Jammu and Kashmir police immediately after the Pahalgam attack to ensure that the perpetrators don’t escape from the country.In June, the NIA arrested two Kashmiri suspects identified as Parvaiz Ahmad Jothar and Bashir Ahmad Jothar, both residents of Pahalgam, for allegedly providing shelter to the perpetrators.Shah said that the two Kashmiris disclosed that three terrorists came to a dhok (seasonal house) in Pahalgam, armed with AK-47 rifles and M-9 carbine on the night of April 21 2025 at 8 PM.“Two of them were dressed in black overalls while the third one was in disguise. They had food and tea and before leaving the dhok they took some food, salt, chillies and spices,” he said.However, according to report by The Indian Express quoting the NIA, the attackers are believed to have arrived at the dhok in Pahalgam on the evening of April 20, two days before the carnage took place at the Baisaran valley.The NIA has not officially rejected this report so far.Delving into the NIA investigation, Shah said that the central agency carried out a “tiring probe” into the attack in which 1,o55 people including family members of the slain tourists, horse attenders, photographers, government officials, shopkeepers and others were questioned.Reading out from a paper in his hand, Shah said that the questioning which purportedly went on for many days amassed around 3000 hours of video footage on the basis of which sketches were prepared.Shah referred to the sketches of the Pahalgam attackers twice during his speech. These sketches were circulated by Jammu and Kashmir police in the aftermath of the attack.However, in June this year, the NIA had said that the sketches were prepared on the basis of a wrong photo of a group of militants recovered from a militant’s phone who was killed on December 4 last year, and that they were not the actual attackers. The central agency has said that it was able to identify the Pahalgam perpetrators with the help of a different set of photos which were obtained from the slain militant’s phone which were verified by the survivors of the April 22 attack.The home minister also claimed that apart from the two Kashmiris arrested by the agency, even their mother has confirmed that the militants who were killed in the Srinagar encounter were the ones who came to their dhok on April 21.However, how she was able to identify one of the three alleged attackers who was “in disguise”, according to Shah, has not been revealed.The home minister seemed to suggest that besides the two Kashmiris, an unspecified number of suspects were detained for providing food to the Pahalgam attackers, even though the NIA has not officially made any such disclosure.“The NIA had already arrested those who sheltered them. Those who provided them food were in their custody. When the bodies of three terrorists reached Srinagar, four of them (detainees) verified that these three were the same terrorists who were responsible for the Pahalgam terrorist attack,” he said.Shah’s earlier remarks in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday suggested that the Pahalgam perpetrators were in touch with only two Kashmiris and that they barely spent some hours in Pahalgam during which they would not have felt any need for food as it was allegedly provided to them at the dhok itself.He didn’t clarify how and where the unidentified suspects provided food to them.