Before they are dragged back to the 1990s, therefore, Kashmiris would do well to acquaint themselves with what really happened on 19 May. The Kashmiri newspaper reports were virtually unanimous. According to Greater Kashmir: “Police said 12-year-old Simran Riyaz died on the spot, while her 5-year-old brother Fayaz Ahmad Parray lost both his legs when they walked over a littered shell in Drang, Parraypora area around Tosa Maidan… ‘The kids were returning from the school when the explosion took place at around 1.40 pm,” a senior police officer said. ‘The boy is undergoing treatment at B&J Hospital at Barzulla. The shell had drifted via Suresh nullah passing through the area’.” On hearing about the accident, the army sent a fact-finding mission to Parraypora. Its findings were as follows: “The explosion took place not in a rubble- strewn open area on, or near, the path back from the school but inside the Parray home, midway along the base of a wall of the room. The explosion was small — far too small to be of an artillery shell, for all it did was to make a small, blackened crater at the base of the wall. The smallest artillery shell would have demolished not only the wall, but the entire house. A cotton razai (duvet), which was lying on the floor with one corner only six inches away from the blackened cavity, was completely undamaged, but a large bloodstain, almost a foot across, upon it about two feet from the cavity showed where one of the children had been injured and possibly died. As the amateur picture shows, it appears that a small explosive, possibly a grenade, exploded at the base of the wall, probably in a niche below the floor level. The explosion sprayed upwards, thereby missing the edge of the razai, but not the children a few feet away.”
Posted on: Fri, 23 May 2014 11:21:33 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015