NEW DELHI: The day before a deadly assault on an air base in northern India, a police officer returning from a temple was abducted by a group of heavily armed men speaking Urdu, he said on Tuesday.

“The minute I saw them I realised that they were terrorists,” Police Superintendent Salwinder Singh told media.

“One of the gunmen snatched my phone and made calls to Pakistan,” Singh said. Urdu, widely spoken in Pakistan, can be mostly understood by Hindi speakers.

The colleague Singh called after he was freed treated it as an armed robbery, one in a string of security lapses preceding the Jan. 2 assault on the Pathankot air base that killed 7 Indian security personnel and injured 22.

Mobile phone tower records indicate the perpetrators made calls from Singh’s phone from inside the air base by mid-afternoon on Jan. 1, according to the Indian Express, some 12 hours before the government said it had detected them through aerial surveillance.