SRINAGAR, 31 March — Eleven people were killed and 25 others injured yesterday when suicide bombers stormed a temple in Kashmir’s Jammu city, officials said.
The daring raid on the Raghunath temple in the bustling Residency Road shopping area of Jammu heightened sectarian tensions in Hindu-dominated Jammu and prompted the authorities to sound a high security alert.
Hindus, who come from across the country for their visit to a hill-top temple, were fleeing Jammu following the attack, a police spokesman said. City police chief Prabhat Singh said two of the three activists who attacked the temple were killed instantly, along with four policemen and four civilians who included two Hindus. Singh said the body of the third activist was found in a search of the blood-smeared inner rooms of the sprawling city center temple and added that it appeared that two of the attackers had come armed as "human bombs".
Twenty-five others were injured in exchanges of fire, Singh said, adding that five of the victims were in critical condition. "The militants arrived in a white Ambassador car, exploded a grenade at the temple’s gate and opened fire, but police sentries posted there killed one of them on the spot while the remaining two sneaked inside," another official said.
He said the temple was packed with some 250 Hindu visitors and the cross-firing sparked off a stampede. Singh said policemen chased the two surviving raiders inside the temple and shot one as he took refuge in the temple’s inner side. Injured survivor Lekh Ram Mistry said the attackers had fired randomly to gain entry. "The militants were running toward the temple gate while firing continuously," said Mistry, who has a gunshot wound in his back. Singh said the attackers belonged to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group, which New Delhi blames for carrying out an attack on the Parliament in December which left 14 people dead.
"They appeared to be part of a suicide squad," he said. Although, later yesterday a less well-known militant group, the Islamic Front, claimed to have carried out the attack in a phone call to the Jammu office of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The raid is the first attack on a temple since the outbreak of violence in the Himalayan state in 1989 and sparked a wave of unrest.
Hindus tried to set fire to an ambulance which was taking the bodies of two of the activists to a morgue. The police escorting the vehicle fired into the air and dispersed the mob. Shops downed shutters as angry protesters burned the car in which the activists came to the temple.
The hard-line Hindu Shiv Sena party called a one-day strike today in Jammu, raising fears of a possible Hindu backlash.
"We are not taking any chances. We are setting up special check points and we are bringing in police reinforcements to face any eventuality," a senior official said.
Hindu tourists were meanwhile fleeing Jammu in fear of sectarian riots similar to those that left more than 700 people dead last month in Gujarat.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister George Fernandes yesterday ruled out a reduction in troops along the border with Pakistan and reiterated that Islamabad must stop "cross-border terrorism". "There is no possibility of de-escalation until two issues raised with Pakistan are taken care of," Fernandes told reporters in Bangalore.
