NEW DELHI, 16 June — Chief Minister of Indian Kashmir Farooq Abdullah had a narrow escape yesterday when militants fired two rocket-propelled grenades near a building where he was attending a function, police said.
One of the shells exploded in a stream 200 yards away, while another hit a wall of the building but did not explode, a police spokesman said. It was later defused by a bomb disposal squad.
Indian commandos whisked the chief minister away from the government building, which he was opening, in the Bemina area of Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar. Counterinsurgency police backed by the Indian Army carried out house-to-house searches in the area in an attempt to arrest those responsible. Local men were rounded up and paraded in front of masked informers — former militants who volunteer to identify rebels.
A hitherto unknown militant group called Al-Madina Regiment claimed responsibility for the attack. The outfit’s spokesman also told reporters in Srinagar that its militants had shot and wounded a member of India’s Border Security Force (BSF) at Batamaloo, an area in Srinagar.
A BSF spokesman confirmed the incident and said the injured man was in a serious condition in Srinagar’s army hospital.
“He was shot from a very close range,” the BSF spokesman said, adding that the pistol-wielding attackers had fled from the area.
Last year Abdullah survived a similar attack in Srinagar. Abdullah is on the hit list of almost all the dozen or so militant groups operating in Kashmir.
