Heard gunshots for 15 mins: Bihar food seller vows never to return
Abu Basar has been living in Kashmir for six years, where he earns ₹2,000 a day during tourist season between March and September.
New Delhi Hours before at least 26 people were killed in a terrorist attack in Kashmir’s Pahalgam, Abu Basar – who hails from Bihar’s Araria, and runs a food stall at the exit gate of the meadow where the attack happened – had spoken to three of his cousins in his village to and encouraged them to board the next train to Kashmir and come to Pahalgam for work. After all, it’s peak tourist season there.
In the evening, however, a nightmare unfolded in front of Basar’s eyes. Around 3pm, as he was making a papri chat for a tourist and talking with his co-villager Mohammad Saifullah, the 25-year-old heard gunshots reverberating in the air. “I saw some men fire at the tourists at the meadow. They had stormed in from the hillside opposite us. I saw people running out of the area, some were injured,” he said.
He immediately closed his food-cart, parked it on other side of the road and fled with Saifullah to Pahalgam, where Saifullah works as a chef, said Basar, who lives in Phalgam, 3km from the meadow where the attack happened.
Basar has been living in Kashmir for six years, where he earns ₹2,000 a day during tourist season between March and September.
Basar, who is planning to leave the Union territory, said, “I’ll never come to Kashmir again, as I can’t lose my life to eke out livelihood.”
Basar’s friend, Mohammed Saifullah, 28, who too is from the same village as him, and is employed as a chef in a hotel at Pahalgam, said he is planning to leave Kashmir too.
Saifullah has been in Pahalgam for four years, and lives 3km away from the meadow. He said, “The hotel I work at is three km away from here, so I decided to go for a waIk. I was with Basar and 30 minutes after I reached, I heard the sound of gunshots. People were running all over to save themselves. We were scared, so Basar quickly closed his shop, and we fled away from there,” he said.
Abdul Gani (30), who hails from neighboring Hasanpur village and works as a mason in Pahalgam, was on the top of a two-storey under-construction building. “Our site is nearly 100 meters away from the exit gate of Baisaran. The moment we heard indiscriminate firing; our contractor asked us to leave work. We shut ourselves in a room, but the sound of gunshots continued for almost half an hour,” he said.
