Militants taking refuge in a building had a chance to escape, but they chose to take on security forces
In the early hours of Sunday morning, a rattle of gunfire punctured a lengthy pause of silence at Sempora on the outskirts of Srinagar city.
The shots fired by militants holed up in a building were distinct — they were single shots and made a sharp sound. The police and Army commandos fired a barrage of bullets amid thuds of grenade blasts.
It is 7:15 am. The gunfight that began on Saturday afternoon has entered the second day. The death toll in the morning included two CRPF constables who were killed in the initial ambush, a young officer of the Army’s Special Forces who was killed during the overnight assault to neutralise the militants and a civilian who died in the initial gunfight.
The busy and bustling National Highway 1A, connecting Srinagar with Jammu, has become lifeless at Sempora in Pulwama district. The militants —believed to be at least three in number — have multiple advantages: the evacuation of civilians from the five-storeyed Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI) gave them enough time to fortify their positions in the concrete building, and they remain at a vantage from the upper floors. To minimise the damage to the building, which houses a nursery for aspiring entrepreneurs, the Army commandos plan to go in for a risky room-to-room intervention which is fraught with the danger of suffering casualties.
The militants, however, repelled multiple assaults to neutralise them. “They have not let anyone come close to the building and are firing at everything that moves close to it,” said a policeman guarding a perimeter, nearly 100 metres from the site of gunbattle.
The lengthy siege to the sprawling EDI building began on Saturday afternoon when militants ambushed a CRPF convoy of 30 vehicles on the highway outside and then walked inside the institute.
Two paramilitary constables were killed in the initial ambush and the militants then moved into the EDI building, turning it into a concrete bunker and the site of a lengthy siege.
“The militants had a long window to escape, but they stayed and waited. It seems they had come prepared,” a police official at the site of the ongoing gun battle told KP.
The location of the gunfight holds a considerable significance. It paralyses the highway, which militants have targeted several times in past years. It is also the site of an encounter in which two militants were killed two months ago, and officials are not dismissing the ongoing attack as revenge and a message by militants that they can attack anytime, anywhere.
The fighting at Sempora raged throughout the day with lengthy pauses of silence that followed a repeat pattern. Police and Army commandos would open a stream of fire and the militants would fire single shots – either displaying a sophisticated level of training or saving ammunition for a longer battle.
“For them their time is over, for us we have plenty of time. We are deliberately going slow because we want to prevent further casualties,” said Inspector General, Operations, CRPF, Nalin Prabhat, who was monitoring the situation near the site of the gunfight.
He said the militants seem to have chosen the building “very carefully, knowing it is huge”. “This definitely would fall in the realm of fidayeen … they have no intention of running away. They wanted to carry out a spectacular attack on the national highway,” Prabhat said.
Around 1:30 pm, as the clock neared 24-hour mark into the gunfight, an armoured vehicle rushed past police barricades carrying an injured Special Forces commando Lance Naik Om Prakash — the fifth fatality — while the battle at the highway seemed a long way from its end.
