At least 26 people, mostly tourists, were killed and several injured when militants dressed in army fatigues opened fire on them while they were enjoying pony rides and lazing around in a meadow above the tourist hotspot of Pahalgam in Kashmir
on Tuesday.
The attack, during which militants with automatic guns appeared to have asked the targets about their religious identity before shooting them, comes at the peak of a tourism season that witnessed a record three million visitors last year. Bitan Adhikary, a 40-year-old Calcuttan who is an engineer in Florida, is among the victims. A naval officer, Lt Vinay Narwal from Kochi, was also killed, as were an Indian tourist from the UAE and a Nepali. At least one local was slain. Twenty-five of the victims were men.
The militants told a woman whose husband they killed to “go tell Modi” what they had done, while another woman was told her father and uncle were being killed as “retribution for supporting Modi”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is cutting short his trip to Saudi Arabia and returning on Tuesday night.
The attack has the potential to imperil tourism, a mainstay of the Kashmir economy.
The first terror strike on tourists in Kashmir in 13 years, and certainly the most horrific, has raised damning questions on security measures and shredded to bits the Modi government’s repeated assertions of normality. The massacre, for which the Lashkar-e-Toiba-affiliated The Resistance Front has claimed responsibility, comes at a time US Vice-President J.D. Vance is touring India. A “deeply disturbed” US President Donald Trump said the people of India “have our full support”. The White House announced that Trump would speak to Modi.
Police sources said the attack killed 26 people, but the government did not give any official death toll till late in the evening.
A massive security operation involving helicopters and drones has been launched to hunt down the militants, who seem to have melted into the forests after unleashing a barrage of bullets on the tourists at the Baisaran Valley. Tourists have to undertake an uphill trek of 5-6km from Pahalgam to reach the meadow or use ponies.
Residents said there were hundreds of tourists and locals in the area at the time of the attack. The first people to respond were locals who tried to help evacuate the injured.
“It was a great afternoon. Tourists were sipping tea and enjoying pony rides. Others had gone a little further towards the deodar trees. Within moments, the meadow was echoing with the sound of screams,” a tourist guide told The Telegraph.
One of the most haunting images to have emerged was that of a woman sitting beside the body of her husband. In a video that went viral, she is heard telling a group of local Kashmiris that they were eating bhelpuri when militants shot him dead as he was “perhaps not a Muslim”.
“He (militant) opened fire at him (her husband). He said he was perhaps not a Muslim and opened fire at him,” she said.
Security force officials appeared reluctant to reveal the enormity of the attack.
Chief minister Omar Abdullah broke the news but did not reveal the death toll. He said the attack was “much larger than anything we’ve seen directed at civilians in recent years”.
“I’m shocked beyond belief. This attack on our visitors is an abomination. The perpetrators of this attack are animals, inhuman & worthy of contempt. No words of condemnation are enough. I send my sympathies to the families of the deceased,” he posted on X.
Lt governor Manoj Sinha, who oversees security and law and order in the Union Territory, said a search operation had been launched to tracethe attackers.
The gruesome attack came as a grim reminder of how militants continued to ravage Jammu and Kashmir even after the scrapping of special status, while top leaders lived in denial and credited the “momentous development” of August 2019 for paving the way for peace.
The mayhem follows an ominous threat by Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, who harked back to his country’s old rhetoric of Kashmir being their “jugular vein” and vowed not to leave “Kashmiri brethren in their heroic struggle that they are waging against Indian occupation”.
For many, the carnage brought back memories of the 2019 Pulwama attack that killed 40 CRPF jawans and brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.
The last major attack on tourists in Kashmir took place in 2012 in Bijbehara, in which four women from Maharashtra were killed. The police had initially played down the incident by blaming it on a gas cylinder explosion in their vehicle.
Tourists have rarely been targeted in Kashmir, which has given them the confidence to visit the place. Their numbers have surged in recent years in response to the Centre’s carefully choreographed “all is well” narrative.
The scrapping of the special status had triggered a spate of militant attacks on members of the minority Hindu community and non-local labourers, but militants largely desisted from targeting tourists. The only exception was an attack in Pahalgam last year when two tourists from Rajasthan— Farah and Tabrez — were injured.
The latest attack has mounted worries for the administration, which is preparing to receive Amarnath pilgrims in the next few weeks.
There had been no attempts by militants in recent years to disrupt the yatra, which is conducted under foolproof security.
The last time militants attacked pilgrims was in July 2017, when eight of them were killed and over a dozen injured in south Kashmir.
The biggest militant attack in Pahalgam on pilgrims took place in August 2000 when 32 people, including 21 Hindu pilgrims, seven Muslim shopkeepers and some security force personnel, were killed.