Suspected militants abducted a soldier vacationing at home in central Kashmir’s Budgam district on Friday, prompting the security forces to launch a search.
A police officer said militants had barged into the home of rifleman Mohammad Yasin Bhat, posted with the Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry, in Qazipora village around 9pm. “He has been abducted,” the officer said.
Sources said the soldier’s family had raised the alarm but the armed kidnappers were unfazed and abducted him.
The village is near the border of Pulwama district, the new ground zero of the azadi movement, which has been dogged by militancy-related violence.
“The soldier had come home on leave and was supposed to stay with his family till March-end,” an official said.
Militants have abducted several policemen and soldiers from their homes in recent years and killed them, causing the thousands of police and soldier families across the Valley to live in fear. Some of the killings have triggered countrywide outrage.
Last year, militants abducted rifleman Aurangzeb while he was on his way home to celebrate Id. The police later found his bullet-riddled body.
Aurangzeb had been awarded the Shaurya Chakra for his role in anti-militancy operations. The army has detained three local soldiers in connection with his abduction and killing.
‘Schoolboy bomber’
A schoolboy has been held for Thursday’s grenade blast at the Jammu bus terminal, whose death toll has risen to two.
Sources said the suspect, Yasir Ahmad Bhat alias Arhaam from south Kashmir’s Kulgam district, is a Class IX student at a private school and a suspected Hizbul Mujahideen recruit.
“He reached the city on Thursday morning with the grenade in a tiffin box,” a source said.
Fear gripped Jammu for the second consecutive day after a suspicious packet was found near a security force bunker beside the city airport’s boundary wall on Friday.
The bomb disposal squad, however, found a pack of batteries but no explosives, officials said. A family living close by had found the packet and raised the alarm.
Riyaz Ahmad, 32, a resident of Anantag in south Kashmir, died in hospital of wounds suffered in Thursday’s blast. A 17-year-old from Haridwar, Mohammad Shariq, had died on Thursday and 32 people were injured.
Jammu inspector-general of police M.K. Sinha has urged shopkeepers to install security cameras. He said CCTV footage and eyewitness testimonies had helped the police arrest Yasir within hours.
K. Vijay Kumar, adviser to governor Satya Pal Malik, said Yasir was “a very ordinary youngster” whom the militants had turned into a “mercenary”.
“It is cruel, brutal and inhuman… to use an innocent mind to achieve a target they will never achieve because we are all together in this,” he said.