Militants kill cop in J&K’s Bandipora, manage to escape after encounter

SRINAGAR: Militants shot dead a 35-year-old policeman and escaped after a gunfight with security forces in north Kashmir’s Bandipora on Sunday.

This was first militant attack after the central government appointed an emissary on October 23 to start peace talks in the state fighting a three-decade-long separatist insurgency.

Bandipora police superintendent Sheikh Zulfikar said constable Zaheer Abbas Khan died of grave bullet wounds in the attack. He was taken to Srinagar for treatment but couldn’t be saved. A resident of Poonch, Khan was a member of the Jammu and Kashmir police’s special operations group. He’s survived by his aged parents, wife and three children — 10-year-old Mehtab Zaheer, Manik Ahmad and Sumaira Zaheer, the younger two aged eight and five.

The gunfight started after a team of policemen accompanied by army and Central Reserve Police Force troopers searched an area called Mir Mohalla in Bandipora’s Hajin following information about two militants hiding there. The militants fired and cut down Khan when the security team approached a house around 8am.

The team engaged the militants holed out in the house till 11.30am but they managed to escape. “No militant was killed … the two escaped probably,” officer Zulfikar said.

According to reports coming from the area, residents protested against the military operation and threw stones at the team. The militants allegedly used the commotion as cover to break out of the security cordon.

But Zulfikar dismissed such a possibility, saying “only a few boys” were protesting. “The protests were not the reason … The area was congested,” he said.

A hunt is launched to track the militants.

This is the second attack in Bandipora this month. On October 11, two Indian Air Force commandos training with the army and an equal number of militants were killed.

The Kashmir Valley has been on the edge since the killing of young Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in June last year, which triggered widespread public unrest and left more than 100 people dead. The security forces too adopted a hard stand against militants, gunning down 160 of them this year.

Army chief General Bipin Rawat warned that the appointment of an interlocutor for dialogue to solve the festering Kashmir crisis won’t have any bearing on the military offensive against insurgents.