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Kathua truck driver falls into honey trap, provides tunnel, bridge pictures to Pak handlers

Accused ordered to conduct surveillance of Samba military area; investigators say cross-border contact ran nearly a year

Atul Sharma
Early Times Report

Jammu, Sept 20: A suspected cross-border espionage network has surfaced in Jammu and Kashmir after security agencies arrested a 24-year-old truck driver from Kathua, allegedly caught in a honeytrap and used to funnel photographs of sensitive tunnels, bridges and toll plazas to handlers in Pakistan.
The accused, Aman Kumar, a resident of Doliyan Jattan, Kot Ponnu village in Mareen tehsil of Kathua district, was reportedly also assigned to keep watch on the Samba military area — tracking troop movement and activity in the sector — as part of his covert brief from across the border.
Interrogation has revealed that Aman's links to the handlers stretch back nearly a year, predating October 2025, when he is believed to have first started collecting and transmitting information. His job as a truck driver made him a valuable asset: his routes carried him from Ladakh through Uttar Pradesh to Lucknow and Guwahati, exposing him to a wide corridor of strategic infrastructure. Investigators say the handlers exploited this mobility, directing him to photograph tunnels linking Ladakh and Kashmir, mountain passes, and major highway bridges along the way.
What sets this case apart from routine information leaks, officials say, is the scale of premeditation involved. Rather than depending on sporadic photographs or secondhand inputs, the handlers pushed for real-time surveillance of border-adjacent areas.
To that end, Aman was allegedly given around Rs 20,000 to

His job as a truck driver made him a valuable asset: his routes carried him from Ladakh through Uttar Pradesh to Lucknow and Guwahati, exposing him to a wide corridor of strategic infrastructure.
The handlers exploited this mobility, directing him to photograph tunnels linking Ladakh and Kashmir, mountain passes, and major highway bridges along the way.
What sets this case apart from routine information leaks is the scale of premeditation involved.
Rather than depending on sporadic photographs or secondhand inputs, the handlers pushed for real-time surveillance of border-adjacent areas.

urchase and install high-definition smart CCTV cameras at his residence. These cameras, fitted with active SIM cards and wired into local internet networks, were positioned close to a road near the border — giving handlers remote, live access to footage of the area. Agencies are now probing whether this setup was used specifically to track the movement of security personnel in the border belt.
Sources indicate a woman handler had invited Aman to Jammu for an in-person meeting, ostensibly to deepen the relationship.
Investigators, however, believe the invitation was calculated rather than genuine: the handlers, tracking Aman's location through GPS, were already aware he was in a different state and could not make it to Jammu in time. The proposal, officials suspect, was less about an actual meeting and more a psychological lever — designed to tighten his emotional dependence on the handler and cement his cooperation.
Agencies are now working to recover deleted data from Aman's phone, including foreign contact numbers, and are scrutinising the alleged live CCTV transmissions alongside other digital trails used to pass information across the border.
The probe has also widened to examine whether transport networks operating in border districts, or dormant sleeper modules, may be linked to the operation. With the investigation still active, officials say establishing the full scope of the network — and whether Aman acted alone or as one node in a larger chain — remains the priority.