The militant attack on army vehicles that killed five soldiers and injured as many in a remote corner of Kathua district on Monday is threatening to put a fresh strain on the security apparatus in Jammu.

The search for the militants, which was suspended late on Monday because of heavy rain, resumed on Tuesday with joint search parties of the army, police and CRPF combing vast areas of Kathua, Udhampur and Doda.

An official said the militants attacked two army vehicles using an M4 assault rifle, armour-piercing bullets and grenades. “They took advantage of a difficult mountainous terrain and fog and disappeared into the forests after carrying out the attack,” he said.

The army’s western command identified the slain soldiers as Naib Subedar Anand Singh, Havaldar Kamal Singh, Naik Vinod Singh, and Riflemen Anuj Negi and Adarsh Negi, all from Uttarakhand.

Bloodstains on the road, helmets, bullet shells, vehicles with shattered windscreens and flattened tyres on Tuesday told the story of fierce resistance by troops and a gunbattle that stretched on for hours after the army patrol was ambushed around 3.30pm on the Machedi-Kindli-Malhar road near Badnotta village.

Amid the telltale signs of violence were the two army vehicles, parked about 300 metres from each other. Given the state of the road, officials said they were probably not going too fast and came under fire while taking a turn.

Local sources said Badnotta village, part of Machedi tehsil and Bani Assembly constituency, has never witnessed an attack like this despite being militancy-prone until the mid-2000s.

“Security forces were withdrawn from several places here like Malhar, Badnotta, Kindi and Malad. The army deployment in Machedi, however, had remained. There was no need for that because it was completely peaceful. But after the Basantgarh incident, security forces have increased their footprint,” a former sarpanch in the area said.

On April 28, a village defence guard identified as Mohammad Sharief was killed in an encounter with terrorists at Basantgarh in adjoining Udhampur, only 12km from Badnotta.

Badnotta is located around 125km from the district headquarters in Kathua, which shows how Jammu’s topography is a fertile ground for militancy. No district in Kashmir has villages separated by such a long distance from the main towns.

“But there are still not enough soldiers here and this is such a vast area full of forests. You have Himachal on one side and Doda district on the other. Although there are no roads, you can reach places on foot.”

The former sarpanch said the thick vegetation coupled with bad roads were a recipe for disaster. “We want deployment of more soldiers here for us to feel safe,” he said.

A former police officer who has served in Jammu said militants were spreading their tentacles to newer areas under an apparent Pakistani strategy to wear the security forces thin.

“The Jammu region is nearly double (26,293sqkm) the area of Kashmir (15,948sqkm). In recent years, militants have carried out attacks in Jammu city, Rajouri, Poonch, Udhampur, Reasi, Doda and Kishtwar. Sadly, it is spreading to newer areas or those which were peaceful for years,” the former police officer said.

Local sources said the residents of Badnotta village are Hindus but civilians were not harmed.

“A civilian bus passed the road about 10 minutes before the attack. We heard a loud explosion and initially took it as a tyre burst but the subsequent heavy firing made us realise that an encounter has started,” Puran Chand Sharma, a villager who runs a shop just a few metres from the scene, told PTI.

The heavy firing continued till 5pm followed by intermittent firing for another hour.

“About 12 villagers were at my shop. We hid ourselves inside to avoid getting caught in the crossfire. After the firing stopped, we rushed to help evacuate the victims,” he said.

A senior BJP leader in Jammu, requesting anonymity, said a top police officer had told him that around 50 militants had infiltrated the Jammu region from PoK. Jammu’s additional director-general of police Anand Jain recently acknowledged that seven militant groups were active in the province.

Top police officers led by director-general of police R.R. Swain went into a huddle with high-ranking army officials in Kathua on Tuesday to review the situation.

Sources said battle-hardened Pakistani militants equipped with sophisticated hard-to-detect communication devices were involved in the attack.

Jammu has witnessed six militant attacks in the last one month, which left nine civilians, five army men and a CRPF jawan dead. Five militants were killed in counter-insurgency operations.

Former chief minister Omar Abdullah stressed how he had been saying all along that militancy was a problem in Jammu and Kashmir and “you can’t wish it away”.

He said the government had convinced itself that the abrogation of Article 370 was the solution to all problems, including terror. “But that clearly isn’t the case,” he said.

Additional reporting by PTI