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57-hour Pampore encounter ends
SRINAGAR: The encounter between security forces and militants holed up in a building of the Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI) in Pampore ended on Wednesday
SRINAGAR: The encounter between security forces and militants holed up in a building of the Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI) in Pampore ended on Wednesday afternoon, as army called off the operation around 57 hours after the gunbattle began.
Army officials said they recovered the bodies of the two militants. An army man and a cop were also injured in the encounter, which started on Monday morning after militants entered EDI’s hostel building.
“Two people have been eliminated and two weapons have been recovered from them,” Victor Force’s GOC Major General Ashok Narula said during a press briefing.
“This was a tricky operation because it is a very huge building and we did not want to have any collateral damage because there were chances of civilians being inside. All those people were first taken out,” he said.
The official said that the slain men were “probably” from Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
The hostel building, in which the militants were holed up since Monday morning, has around 60 rooms and the forces waited for the gunmen to exhaust their ammunition before gunning them down.
“The building has 60 rooms and every room has an attached bathroom. We had to follow the drill for every room. That is the reason it took time to clear each room. There are too many rooms and too many floors, it was a tedious process,” Narula said.
The security forces launched their final assault on Wednesday morning after pounding the seven-storey building with heavy explosives during the night.
This was the second time in the past eight months that militants targeted the complex, which comprises a guest house, a hostel and the main office building.
In February, five security personnel and a civilian were killed after militants attacked a CRPF convoy outside the EDI complex on the Srinagar-Jammu highway and then walked into the main building. The encounter had lasted for about 48 hours and ended with the death of three militants.
The latest attack has raised questions about security arrangements in and around the complex. After the February attack, authorities had decided to build bunkers around the complex but the work on it is yet to begin. Only a tin fence was erected on the front to secure the complex after the incident.
