Kashmir bus bomb kills one and injures 23
One passenger died and 23 people were injured today when a bomb exploded on a bus heading for a Hindu pilgrimage site in Indian-controlled Kashmir, police and hospital sources said.
The bus was just leaving Jammu, the winter capital of India’s northern Jammu-Kashmir state, for a base camp where pilgrims set out to walk to a Hindu shrine in Katra, 30 miles north of Jammu.
The shrine honours the Hindu goddess of power, Vaishno Devi.
Authorities were still pulling passengers out of the bus, a police officer in the police control room said and more were feared dead.
The attack came on a national holiday marking the birthday of India’s independence leader, Mohandas K Gandhi, who repeatedly called for unity between India’s Hindus and Muslims.
He was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic in 1948, shortly after the partition of India and Pakistan.
It was the second attack on a bus in as many days by suspected Islamic militants trying to disrupt state legislature elections in the disputed Himalayan state claimed by both India and Pakistan.
Nine people were killed in a raid on a bus near the Pakistan border in Kashmir’s Kathua district yesterday, just before polls opened for the third round of state assembly elections.
Six paramilitary soldiers were also killed in an explosion yesterday.
The militants have waged a 12-year insurgency for the independence of Indian-controlled Kashmir or its merger with Muslim Pakistan. More than 60,000 people have been killed and thousands are missing.
The renewed violence during the state elections was likely to further strain relations between India and Pakistan.
The nuclear-armed rivals have twice gone to war over the Himalayan enclave and nearly clashed again earlier this year when New Delhi blamed Islamabad for a suicide attack on India’s Parliament compound.
The South Asian neighbours still have a million troops on high alert along their frontier.
