Grenade Attack at Bus Stand: One dead, 32 injured in J&K

A teenager was killed and 32 others injured in a grenade attack by suspected terrorists in the crowded general bus stand area in the heart of Jammu city yesterday, officials said.

The person who threw the grenade has been arrested, police said, adding he is an operative of Pakistan-based militant group Hizbul Mujahideen.

The suspect had reached Jammu from Kulgam yesterday morning. Police said they identified him using CCTV footage.

This is the third grenade attack by terrorists at the bus stand since May last year, viewed by security agencies as an attempt to disturb communal harmony and peace in the city.

Mohammad Sharik, 17, a resident of Haridwar in Uttarakhand, who was among 33 people brought to the hospital, succumbed to splinter injuries in the chest, the officials said.

The condition of four more injured people was "critical" and two of them had to be operated upon by doctors, they said.

The injured included 11 residents of Kashmir, two from Bihar and one each from Chhattisgarh and Haryana, the officials said.

A senior police officer, Manish Kumar Sinha, told reporters that the grenade probably rolled under a parked bus before it went off around 11:30 am, reported news agency IANS.

A parked bus of the state road transport corporation (SRTC) suffered extensive damage in the blast which caused panic among the people.

"Whenever there is heightened state of alert, we strengthen checking and frisking but there is always a possibility of someone slipping through and this one seems to be a case like that," the IGP M K Sinha said.

The officer said there was no specific input about such an attack in the city.

Immediately after the explosion, people ran to safety and later as the situation returned to normal, shifted the injured to the hospital.

"The blast occurred on the roadside when there was huge rush of people. I had come to drop my wife who was going to board a bus to Punjab," one of the injured, Kuldeep Singh of the Pragwal area of the city, said.

Singh, who is undergoing treatment along with his wife at Government Medical College hospital for injuries, said he felt that somebody hurled something which caused the powerful explosion, reported PTI.

On December 28-29 last year, suspected terrorists carried out a grenade attack on the bus stand with the intention to target the local police station building, an attack which took place seven months after another grenade attack along the B C Road left two policemen and a civilian injured on May 24, 2018.

A senior government minister condemned the yesterday's attack. "I wish the injured a speedy recovery," added Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Twitter.

Jammu and Kashmir state is divided between Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region that sees a large amount of militant activity, and Jammu, a Hindu-majority region and home to a city of the same name, where such action is less common.

Kashmir has been divided and disputed since the partition of the British colony of India and the creation of independent India and Pakistan in 1947.

They both rule it in part but claim it in full.