An Indian paramilitary soldier stands guard Tuesday as Amarnath bounded pilgrims entering the Amarnath base camp in Jammu, the winter capital of Kashmir. (Jaipal Singh/European Pressphoto Agency)
SRINAGAR, India — She had come to pray.
Pushpa Gosawi was on a bus traveling through the Himalayas when she heard gunfire thunder around her. Gosawi recalled being “terrified” as she witnessed her fellow pilgrims being felled by bullets. “I saw the other people in a pool of blood in the bus, and I was in an utter shock,” she said, lying in a hospital bed.
Gosawi was one of several injured Monday evening when the bus, ferrying Hindu pilgrims from the Amarnath shrine in the Indian-administered portion of Kashmir, was caught in the crossfire between militants and police. Seven people, including six women, died, authorities said.
Kashmir, the Himalayan region that straddles India and Pakistan, has been in dispute since India’s independence from Britain and the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Both nations claim it in its entirety.
Monday’s ambush drew widespread condemnation in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that he was “pained beyond words on the dastardly attack,” which he said “deserves strongest condemnation from everyone.”
Police have accused Abu Ismail, a member of the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, of coordinating the attack. Lashkar-e-Taiba is also accused of coordinating the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, which targeted several landmarks over three days and killed 166 people.
The group has denied any involvement.
The arduous Amarnath pilgrimage brings more than 215,000 people to the cavernous peaks of the Himalayas every year. They come to pray to a dome-shaped icicle in the Amarnath cave that appears for a few weeks every year before melting away in the sun. Believers say it is the place where the Hindu god Shiva whispered the secret of his immortality to his wife.
Although militants are active in the mountains of Kashmir, they have usually spared Amarnath pilgrims as a mark of respect for the Hindu faith. Weather can also put the pilgrims in peril, as can the rigors of the pilgrimage, which includes hiking through snow-capped peaks to reach the holy cave.
The attack on the pilgrims occurred only weeks after the lynching of police officer Mohammed Ayub Pandith in Srinagar, the main city in Indian-controlled Kashmir, by a mob that was supposedly chanting slogans in favor of militant Zakir Musa.
Even prominent militants, such as the recently slain Hizbul Mujahideen leader Burhan Wani, have in the past vowed not to disturb the sanctity of the pilgrimage.
The previous such attack on pilgrims occurred in 2000, when 25 people were killed in Pahalgam, a base-camp town for pilgrims.
On Tuesday evening, Kashmiris gathered in the streets holding posters and signs to condemn the attack on the Amarnath pilgrims. A top separatist leader and president of the Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Freedom Party, Shabir Ahmed Shah, said the attack belied the “tradition of communal brotherhood’’ that the people of Kashmir have upheld over the decades.
According to reports, security had been beefed up for this year’s pilgrimage after the July 2016 killing of Wani in a shootout with police prompted a year of intensified violence in the Kashmir Valley. Drones, dog squads and bulletproof bunkers were prepared; as many as 40,000 troops would man the highways as the convoy of pilgrims passed through.
The bus carrying Gosawi should never have been there, authorities said. Anantnag District Police Chief Altaf Ahmad Khan said the pilgrims had not followed security protocol and were not traveling as part of the convoy escorting pilgrims.
“The sequence of events was such that militants attacked a police party from an alley. The pilgrims probably didn’t hear gunshots, and the vehicle, which was traveling fast, came under fire,” he said.
Doshi reported from New Delhi.
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