A day after the Kathua terror attack, an eyewitness said on Tuesday that only minutes before terrorists ambushed the targeted army truck, a bus full of civilians used the road on which the ambush took place.
“A civilian bus passed by on the road 10 minutes before the attack. We heard a loud explosion and at first we thought it was a blown tire. But the heavy gunfire that followed made us realise that a fighting had started,” Puran Chand Sharma, who runs a shop a few metres from the site, told PTI.
“There were about 12 villagers in my tent. We hid internally to be caught in the crossfire. The shooting continued until 5 p. m. , followed by intermittent gunfire for another hour. After it stopped, we ran to help evacuate the wounded,” Sharma added.
The attack took place at around 3:30 p. m. in the village of Badnota, Loi Malhar, in Billawar Tehsil, a few kilometers from the Kathua district headquarters.
Meanwhile, Vijay Kumar, another resident, said this was the first terrorist incident in the village since the outbreak of cross-border terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir in the 1990s.
“We have not noticed any movement of terrorists in our area, which has more than a hundred families. It’s possible that the terrorists came here on the bus that spent a while before the ambush,” Kumar said.
A total of 10 infantrymen were wounded, five of whom succumbed to their wounds, while the rest are under treatment.
The search for the attackers, which was suspended on Monday night due to heavy rains, resumed on Tuesday, with joint search parties from the Indian Army, Jammu and Kashmir Police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) submitted from instructions they added to the report. and Doda.
The army’s elite para commandos, along with sniffer dogs, also joined the search operation, while drones and helicopters were also pressed into service for surveillance, officials said.
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