SRINAGAR: Two Indian Reserve Police (IRP) force personnel were killed and 12 others injured in a sneak attack by separatist militants in Zewan area on the peripheries of Kashmiri capital Srinagar on Monday evening. The condition of a few injured policemen is stated to be critical, the police and hospital sources said.
A report put the number of the injured at 16. The police sources said that the bus carrying the personnel of the IRP’s 19th Battalion came under attack at Aripora along the Pantha ChowkKhanmoh link road near Zewan, about 14-km southeast of the city centre. Two of the injured policemen including an assistant sub-inspector succumbed at the 92-Base Army hospital here. Sources said that the militants fired their automatic weapons “indiscriminately”. A police official said, “The condition of a couple of more critically injured policemen is stated to be critical.” After the injured were removed to the 92-Base Hospital at the nearby headquarters of the Army’s 15 Corps, police reinforcements joined by columns of the CRPF and the Army laid siege to the area and started searches to capture the assailants dead or alive, sources said.
This was the first major attack on a police bus in Kashmir Valley after the February 14, 2019, suicide attack on a bus of the CRPF in which 40 personnel were killed and several others wounded at nearby Lethapora in Pulwama district.
