Security forces personnel take position outside the JKEDI building where militants have reportedly taken refuge after launching an attack on a CRPF convoy at Sampora Pampore, near Srinagar. (Photo: PTI)
At least 10 CRPF jawans have been wounded, two of them fatally, in a militant ambush on a CRPF convoy and subsequent gun battle between the two sides outside the Kashmiri town of Pampore, 16 km south of summer capital Srinagar.
A report said that a third CRPF jawan among the injured too had died in hospital, but a CRPF spokesman said only two of its men have died.
A civilian injured in the initial firing has also succumbed in hospital, raising the toll to three.
Three gunmen, after targeting the Srinagar-bound convoy of the CRPF with gunfire along the Srinagar-Jammu highway at Pampore on Saturday afternoon, fled into the nearby J&K Entrepreneurship Development Institute (JKEDI) campus.
They have been surrounded by the security forces and intermittent firing was on at the time of filing this report.
Abdul Gani Mir, 48, who worked as a gardener at the campus and was injured in the initial firing, died in hospital later, police and hospital sources said.
While an armed standoff in now underway, 115 students, faculty members and other staff who were trapped inside the campus have been evacuated to safer places, 25 of them from the main block where the militants have taken up positions.
Officials said that there are possibly no more civilians left within the campus and reinforcements from CRPF have been joined by members of the J&K police’s counter-insurgency special operations group to take on the holed-up militants. A column of the Army is on standby. However, officials said that it is the CRPF which is leading the operation against militants and that the final assault against the militants is likely to be launched with first light on Sunday.
Some of the students and faculty members who were earlier trapped inside the main block of the campus after the outbreak of the gunbattle told reporters that the militants asked them to leave as they apparently did not want any harm to come to them.
A student who contacted a reporter friend on his mobile phone had said that there were more than 150 students inside the building when the firing outside it started. “On seeing gunmen rushing in, many students and some staff members fled towards safer locations,” the student said. However, the computer lab staff was caught unawares and was trapped inside the building. Dozens others were trapped inside the main block, the hostel and other buildings within the campus.
Former chief minister Omar Abdullah took to Twitter to say: “Praying this news is wrong. All JKEDI does is train youngsters to look beyond government jobs & become entrepreneurs.”
