Eighteen Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed as a group of terrorists in a car bomb launched an attack on them at Awantipora in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district on Thursday. Forty others are said to be injured, some of them in extremely critical condition.
The group Jaish-e-Mohammed has claimed responsibility for the attack.
It is perhaps the worst attack since the Uri incident of 2016 which claimed 19 lives.
The car bomb was deployed to launch the attack when a convoy of 70 CRPF vehicles carrying 2,500 men was travelling on the Srinagar-Jammu highway in the Goripara region. Apparently, so many of them were travelling together because the highway had been shut for the past few days due to the bad weather conditions. The injured were taken to the Army base hospital at Srinagar.
While it is being said to be a ‘possible suicide attack’, unless more details are available this cannot be confirmed.
Director general CRPF Vijay Kumar told the media that senior officers are ‘at the spot’ and the ‘investigation is underway’.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi, former Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah, People’s Democratic Party chief Mehbooba Mufti are among those who condemned the attack.
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