Srinagar , April 2: Kashmiri militants blew up a railway track in southern Pulwama district late Thursday night, disrupting rail services though briefly, the police said here on Friday.
There were no casualties as no train was running when the militants detonated an improvised explosive device, damaging a section of the track at Ratnipora, about 40 km from here, at 9.50 pm on Thursday.
The Hizbul Mujahedin claimed responsibility, saying it had targeted the rail track at night when no trains were running in order to avoid civilian casualties. “We didn’t want any harm to come to people travelling by the train; hence we chose a particular place and time to trigger the blast,” its spokesperson Ahsan Illahi told local newspapers over the telephone from an undisclosed location.
This is the first time that militants have targeted the railway in the Kashmir Valley, where a train runs every day on the Qazigund-Baramulla track which opened to traffic only last year.
Officials said that two to three metre of track was damaged in the IED blast. Engineers and workers of Ircon, the construction wing of the Indian Railways, were quickly at the scene to repair the track. Rail services were disrupted on the Qazigund-Srinagar section of the route for some time, while services between Srinagar and Baramulla could operate on schedule.
The attack came ahead of a visit by senior railway officers to Kashmir to review progress of the ongoing work in the prestigious rail project that will connect the Valley with the country’s huge railway network. The Baramulla-Qazigund rail link project took over a decade to complete.
Official sources here said Railway Board chairman S.S. Khurana and around a dozen other senior officials reached here late on Friday. They will review the progress of work during their three-day stay in the Valley.
Age Correspondent