SRINAGAR, 6 December 2004 — Kashmiri secessionists killed 11 people, including eight soldiers and an officer, when they activated a land mine. The mine blew up the vehicle carrying the soldiers at Nain Batapora village in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district on Saturday night.
The dead included an officer of the rank of major, eight soldiers, a special police officer and the civilian driver identified as Mehrajuddin.
The powerful blast left a 3-meter-wide crater in the road, police officer Imtiaz Ahmed said. “The bodies of the victims are in pieces. It is a very awful sight.”
The soldiers were on a night patrol in the private sports utility vehicle when the explosion occurred, Ahmed said.
A man claiming to be a spokesman for the Hezbul Mujahedeen militant group claimed responsibility for the blast in a call to a local news agency, the Central News Service. Hezb is the largest among the militant groups that have been fighting Indian security forces since 1989 to carve out a separate homeland or merge Kashmir with India’s neighbor Pakistan. The rebels took six automatic guns, a machine gun and three radio sets from the slain soldiers before fleeing, the purported Hezb spokesman told Central News Service.
Separately, top opposition leader Farooq Abdullah escaped an apparent attempt on his life during a lakeside memorial service in Srinagar. Abdullah was attending an annual memorial service to his father at a cemetery when a grenade exploded some 200 meters away. No one was injured in the attack.
In the nearby Anantnag district, three militants holed up in a mosque were killed on Saturday night in a gunbattle with troopers who surrounded the building, defense spokesman Lt. Col. R.K. Sen said.
The rebels had entered the mosque after soldiers raided the village. The mosque was not damaged in the fighting, Sen said.
Fed Up With Violence
Fed up with years of violence, some youths have started leaving the state for glamour of Bollywood. Mohsin Akhtar, 22, has witnessed the violence for most of his life. Today he has one ambition: to be the biggest sex symbol in India, the Indian Express newspaper reported yesterday.
He was among five men recently given contracts by the Elite Modeling Agency in New Delhi and is busy with auditions for various TV soap operas, the report said.
“There’s no future there for young Kashmiris,” the report quoted Nabeel Malik, 24, the son of a Kashmir university professor as saying. Malik dreams of “fame and fortune in the glamour world”.
Majid Tunda, 23, said he could have helped his father, a successful travel agent in Srinagar, who also owns several houseboats, but left Kashmir because he had “itchy feet”, the report said. He first plans to make it big in Bombay, India’s financial capital, and then Manhattan as a model and actor.
While all of them have landed various modeling assignments, their first big break comes next month when they walk the ramp for Italian couturier Valentino in New Delhi, according to the report.
The newspaper report quoted them as saying their biggest problem in New Delhi was finding a house since many landlords refused to rent space to Kashmiri Muslims.
— Additional input from agencies
