At least nine people were killed and 32 injured when a pile of explosives seized from Nowgam police station in Indian-occupied Kashmir detonated last night, a Home Ministry official said on Saturday.
Most of the dead were police and forensic team officials extracting samples from a large cache of explosives seized earlier this week in Haryana state, the Indian Press Trust (PTI) saying.
Prashant Lokhande, joint secretary in the home ministry, said the cause of the incident was being investigated and any further speculation about the cause of the blast was unnecessary. PTI aggregate.
According to the report, those killed in the incident included three people from the Forensic Science Laboratory, two from the revenue department, two police photographers, a member of the State Investigation Agency and a tailor.
At least 24 police officers and three civilians were admitted to various hospitals in Srinagar, PTI cited officials said.
Samples of the recovered material are being sent for further forensic examination since Thursday, said the region’s director general of police, Nalin Prabhat, and the procedure is being handled with “utmost caution” due to its “unstable and sensitive nature.”
“However, unfortunately, during this course (on Friday) around 11:20 p.m., an accidental explosion occurred. Any further speculation about the cause of this incident is unnecessary,” the officer told reporters.
“The police station building has been severely damaged and adjacent buildings have been affected,” he added. “Successive small explosions” prevented immediate rescue operations by the bomb disposal team, the PTI fixed.
Some of the bodies were “completely burned,” a police source said. Reuters. “The intensity of the explosion was such that some body parts were recovered from nearby houses, about 100 or 200 meters from the police station.”
The explosion comes four days after a deadly car explosion in Delhi, which killed at least eight people in what India has called a “terrorist incident.”
India’s National Counter-Terrorism Investigation Agency is leading the investigation into the blast, but officials have so far given little additional information about who the perpetrators might be and whether it was a local group or had foreign links.
Indian media have widely linked the Nov. 10 explosion to a series of arrests just hours earlier, when they claimed to have seized explosive materials and assault rifles.
Indian police have carried out extensive raids in occupied Kashmir since Wednesday. There has been no confirmation that this week’s searches are linked to the New Delhi blast, but the raids represent a renewed effort by police to tighten security after the incident.
Officers also raided Al-Falah University in Faridabad, while security forces demolished a house in occupied Kashmir’s Pulwama district on Friday.
