Civilians marched towards an encounter site chanting pro-freedom slogans and started hurling rocks at security forces engaged in a gunfight with a lone militant holed up inside a private house at Puchal, in Jammu and Kashmir’s southern district of Pulwama, on Thursday.
Half a dozen civilians and three policemen, including the area Dy SP, were injured in the clash. A report said the police opened fire after teargas and a cane-charge failed to disperse the stone-throwing crowds, injuring two persons. The police only confirmed that two civilians, Abdur Rehman Dar and Amir Ahmad Dar, “received injuries in their left arm and left thigh” and had been taken to a Srinagar hospital where their condition was said to be “stable”.
It was a “major challenge” for the security forces to avert “collateral damage”, as one of the officers put it. “However, undeterred by what the mob chose to do, the security forces eventually killed the militant,” he said. But witnesses said the militant was slain only after the police blew up the brick-and-timber house. The villagers had tried to barge into the raging gunfight, apparently to save the trapped Lashkar-e-Tayyaba commander, a resident of neighbouring Bagh-e-Trich village identified as Shakoor Ahmed Teli, alias Saif.
The gunfight lasted more than 10 hours, police sources here said. Soon after learning the militant commander has been killed, angry villagers set a police vehicle on fire.