Jammu, May 25
Five constables of the CRPF and four militants were killed in two separate incidents in the Jammu region during the past 24 hours.
The police said that five CRPF jawans, including the driver of the vehicle, were killed and two others critically wounded when the vehicle they were travelling in from Sudh Mahadev to Chenani was smashed in a mine blast this morning.
The militants had planted the mine on the main road which went off when the CRPF vehicle passed over it. Four CRPF men died on the spot and one succumbed to his injuries while being carried to the military hospital in Udhampur. Two others admitted in the military hospital are in a critical condition.
Pakistan-based militant outfit Hizbul Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the attack.
Hizbul spokesman Salim Hashmi said in Islamabad that the blast was triggered by its activists.
In Srinagar, an official spokesman said two human heads identified as that of one Jamaluddin and his wife were picked by police from the Kenthan forest in Baramulla district last night.
Their bodies were yet to be found, he said.
The spokesman said the highly decomposed body of a 35-year-old woman, abducted by militants on May 19 from her Goripora-Rawalpora residence, was found in a ditch here.
A BSF jawan was injured in a militant-engineered IED blast at Trissal-tahab in Pulwama district.
Minutes after the explosion, a BSF team, which rushed to area, detected another powerful IED which was defused, the spokesman said.
In the Poonch and Rajouri areas, four activists of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, including its logistic “commander”, Abu Jarish Adil of Multan in Pakistan were killed in three separate encounters with the Army and the police yesterday.
The Lashkar activists had attacked patrol parties of security forces which provoked the police and the Army to retaliate.
Police sources said the militants were aiming at kicking up subversive violence in and around the historic shrine at Sudh Mahadev during the annual pilgrimage to the place in the first week of next month. Accordingly, groups of police and CRPF personnel have been deployed on the route to the hilly shrine and around it.
The sources said that agencies across the border have directed the militants, especially foreign mercenaries, to target temples and other shrines to kick up communal trouble. It was as part of this plan that militants hurled a grenade on the historic temple in Poonch.
The grenade exploded a few metres away from the temple and damaged some shops and the wall of a cooperative bank.
The security forces have been asked to carry out round-the-clock patrolling around all shrines to keep the militants away.
In other militancy-related incidents across the state, the general secretary of the Ahal-e-Hadees, Abdul Gani Dar, was shot and seriously injured by unidentified gunmen at Gawkadal Masjid near here this afternoon. Two other people were also injured in the shootout.
