Journalist covering Kashmir helps injured teen
He was documenting a protest by dozens of Kashmiri students confronting armed security forces wearing riot gear. But when an 18-year-old was hit in the head and began bleeding profusely, AP photographer put down his camera and rushed in to help her.
“It was an instant decision, and I didn’t think twice,” Dar Yasin said. He explained that he was closest to the woman and so best able to help. “I gave my camera to a colleague . ... I took the injured girl in my arms.”
The scene soon became chaotic. Other protesters became angry when they saw the woman bleeding and hurled stones at the police and paramilitary soldiers, who retaliated with tear gas.
Yasin carried Khushboo Jan away from the protest site in Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar, and urged her anxious friends not to worry. “I told the girl protesters that I have two daughters,” he said.
The effort was captured by another photographer who then helped Yasin load Jan into a car that had been pulled up by a civilian to take her to a hospital.
“When I saw Yasin helping the girl, I thought I should document it and clicked some shots,” said the other photographer, Faisal Khan, from the Turkish news organisation Anadolu Agency.
Yasin and Khan then resumed taking photographs of the protest. Jan received six stitches on her forehead before being sent home from the hospital later that day.
The students demonstrating on Thursday had been protesting a police raid on a college less than two weeks earlier in the town of Pulwama.
Police released a brief statement after Thursday’s protest saying Jan had been hurt in a stone-throwing incident, targeting the police and paramilitary troops. Jan said, however, that she had been hit by a marble fired from a sling by a soldier in a nearby bunker. Marbles are often used by Indian forces as ammunition used against protesters.
“Later, my friends told me that I was rescued by some media persons,” Jan told AP on Sunday, as Yasin visited her in her Srinagar home.
Tensions between Kashmiri students and Indian law enforcement have escalated since April 15, when government forces raided the college in Pulwama, about 30 kilometres south of Srinagar. Hundreds of students tried to resist the raid, sparking clashes that left at least 50 students injured. Authorities have not explained what they were searching for or targeting in that raid.