Kathua: Civil bus passed attack site minutes before army truck ambushed, says eyewitness

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 civil bus passed the road 10 minutes before the attack. We heard a loud explosion and initially took it as a tyre burst. But the subsequent heavy firing made us realise that an encounter has started,” Puran Chand Sharma, who runs a shop just a few metres from the site, told PTI.

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“About 12 villagers were at my shop. We hid ourselves inside it to avoid getting caught in the crossfire. The firing continued till 5 pm followed by intermittent firing for another hour. After it stopped, we rushed to help evacuate the casualties,” Sharma added.

The attack unfolded around 3:30 pm at Badnota village of Loi Malhar in Billawar tehsil around 120 km from Kathua’s district headquarters.

Meanwhile, Vijay Kumar, another local, spoke about how this was the first terror incident in the village since cross-border terrorism broke out in Jammu and Kashmir in the 1990s.

“We have not noticed any movement of terrorists in our area which has more than 100 families. The terrorists might have come here in the bus that had passed by a short while before the ambush,” Kumar stated.

A total of 10 soldiers were hit of whom five succumbed to their injuries while the rest are undergoing treatment.

The search for the assailants, which was suspended late Monday because of heavy rain, resumed on Tuesday, with joint search parties of the Indian Army, Jammu and Kashmir Police, and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) launched from various directions, including Kathua, Udhampur and Doda.

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The elite para-commandos of the army, along with sniffer dogs, also joined the search operation, while drones and helicopters were also pressed into service for surveillance, officials said.