Srinagar: Just three days before local body elections in Srinagar, three workers of the National Conference (NC) were on Friday shot at from point blank range by unknown gunmen in Jammu and Kashmir’s summer capital. While two of them died soon after being admitted to hospital, the third is battling for life, police and hospital sources said.
The attack came on a day when home minister Rajnath Singh blamed Pakistan for the unrest in the state and claimed that 90 per cent of the people in the state would like to participate the panchayat and urban local bodies polls. The polling for the Srinagar municipal corporation is scheduled on October 8.
Srinagar senior superintendent of police Imtiyaz Ismail said that three NC workers were sitting in a shop in Qarfali Mohalla when attacked.
“It appears they were targeted deliberately. It wasn’t a sort of indiscriminate act of firing,” he said.
The slain have been identified as Mushtaq Ahmed Wani and Nazir Ahmed Bhat while the injured was identified as Shakeel Ahmed Zangoo.
The authorities have blamed the shooting on separatist militants, but none of the militant outfit has owned responsibility.
The separatists and supporting militants have asked people to boycott the local body elections on the premise that such exercises cannot be a substitute to the promised plebiscite to determine the political future of Jammu and Kashmir.
A delegation of the NC met governor Satya Pal Malik to demand a probe into the shooting incident and protection to party workers.
Meanwhile, a CRPF jawan was injured in a grenade attack in Tral area of southern Pulwama district late Friday evening. The police said that suspected militants hurled at hand grenade towards a camp of the CRPF’s 180th Battalion in Tral town, resulting in injuries to one of its jawans.
In New Delhi, the Union home minister said that security environment in J&K had improved as number of terror incidents had dropped drastically from 6,000 in 1995 to just 360 in 2017.
While admitting that situation in the state needs to improve further, Mr Singh said that Indian is keen to have better relations with Pakistan but it continues to fully support and sponsor terror activities in the state.
He also said that people of J&K were keen to be take part the electoral process like that of local bodies and panchayats which are being revived after a long time.
The home minister admitted that the “experiment of a PDP-BJP government in J&K did not succeed” even though both parties tried to honour the mandate of the Assembly elections.
