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Six construction workers and a doctor were killed and five people were wounded in a suspected militant attack in the restive Himalayan territory of Kashmir in India on Sunday evening.
Gunmen opened fire indiscriminately on a camp housing workers involved in a tunnel project in Ganderbal district in the latest attack on workers from outside Kashmir, where an armed rebellion against Indian rule has raged since 1989.
The attackers also burned two vehicles of the company constructing the Z Morh tunnel at Gagangeer.
The tunnel is a strategic asset as it connects regional capital Srinagar to Ladakh, where the Indian military is locked in border disputes with Pakistan and China.
Police and military have cordoned off the Gagangeer area and launched a search for the attackers.
Kashmir’s police chief Vidhi Kumar Birdi said the victims included “non-local and local persons”.
The attack occurred less than a week after Kashmir got its first elected government in a decade.
Kashmir, Ladakh and the neighbouring region of Jammu formed India’s northernmost state until 2019, when Narendra Modi’s federal government downgraded it into a pair of territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh – ruled directly by Delhi. It also removed from India’s constitution provisions that gave the majority-Muslim region a degree of autonomy, fulfilling a longstanding aim of the ruling party’s Hindu nationalist agenda.
These and other legal changes mean that Kashmir’s newly-elected local government has vastly reduced powers than it did prior to 2019.
This was the second attack on workers from outside Kashmir since the new government took over. Police recovered a non-local worker’s body, riddled with bullet wounds, from a maize field in southern Shopian district on Friday. Authorities claimed he was killed by militants.
Omar Abdullah, the new chief minister, called Sunday’s a “dastardly and cowardly attack on non-local labourers”. “These people were working on a key infrastructure project in the area,” he said.
“I strongly condemn this attack on unarmed innocent people and send my condolences to their loved ones.”
Manoj Sinha, the lieutenant governor who administers the territory for New Delhi, assured that “those behind this despicable act will not go unpunished”.
“Full freedom has been given to police, army and security forces” to deal with the perpetrators, he said.
The federal road transport and highways minister also condemned “the horrific terror attack on innocent labourers” who he said were “engaged in a vital infrastructure project”.
The family of the doctor killed in Sunday’s attack was left devastated. “It felt like doomsday when we heard about his death. There is mourning in the whole village, every eye is moist today,” Dr Shahnawaz Qadir Dar’s cousin, identified by only his first name Tariq, was quoted as saying by the Greater Kashmir newspaper.
Dar was from Nadigam village in the central district of Budgam.
Additional reporting by agencies
