Twenty-six people were killed and 17 were injured when suspected militants opened fire at tourists in India’s Jammu and Kashmir territory, police said on Wednesday, the worst such attack in the country in nearly two decades.
The attack took place on Tuesday in a meadow in the Pahalgam area of the scenic, Himalayan federal territory and the dead included 25 Indians and one Nepalese national, police said.
It was the worst attack on civilians in India since the 2008 Mumbai shootings, and shattered the relative calm in Kashmir, where tourism has boomed as an anti-India insurgency, opens new tabhas waned in recent years.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi cut short his two-day visit to Saudi Arabia and returned to New Delhi on Wednesday morning.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was also cutting short her visit to the United States and Peru “to be with our people in this difficult and tragic time”, her ministry said.
Modi held a meeting with the national security adviser, the foreign minister and other senior officials at the airport and a special security cabinet meeting had been called for 0530 GMT, a defence ministry official said.
A little-known militant group, the “Kashmir Resistance,” claimed responsibility for the attack in a social media message. It expressed discontent that more than 85,000 “outsiders” had been settled in the region, spurring a “demographic change”.(Reuters)
