Srinagar: On a day when Peoples’ Conference leader and Jammu and Kashmir’s social welfare and science and technology minister Sajad Gani Lone met Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, in Delhi to discuss the prevailing situation in the State and certain official matters, a senior party activist was shot dead by unknown gunmen in frontier Kupwara district.
Police sources said that PC worker Ghulam Nabi Khoja in later forties was targeted with gunfire outside his home in Kralgund village of Handwara area. The gunmen –four to five in number- called him outside his home and shot him from a close range at about 8.45 pm, his family members told the police. He was rushed to a nearby hospital where he succumbed to his injuries. The police blamed the murder on separatist militants.
It is for the first that a PC worker has been targeted after its chairman Mr. Lone, a former separatist, chose to switch sides, fought and won election to the State Assembly in 2014 to become an ally of the BJP and subsequently a minister in the PDP-BJP government. His father and founder the PC, Abdul Gani Lone, was killed by alleged militants in Srinagar on May 21, 2002.
