Deadly attack on tourists in India shakes up region

TWENTY-SIX men were killed and 17 were injured when suspected militants opened fire at tourists in India’s Jammu and Kashmir territory, police said yesterday, the worst such attack in the country in nearly two decades.

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It was the worst attack on civilians in India since the 2008 Mumbai shootings, and shattered the relative calm in Kashmir, where tourism has boomed as an anti-India insurgency has waned in recent years.

The attack took place on Tuesday in the Baisaran valley in the Pahalgam area of the scenic, Himalayan federal territory and the dead included 25 Indians and one Nepalese national, police said.

The attack is seen as a setback to what Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party have projected as a major achievement in revoking the semi-autonomous status Jammu and Kashmir enjoyed and bringing peace and development to the long-troubled Muslim-majority region.

Modi cut short his two-day visit to Saudi Arabia and returned to New Delhi yesterday. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was also cutting short her visit to the US and Peru “to be with our people in this difficult and tragic time’, her ministry said.

Modi held a meeting with the national security advisor, the foreign minister and other senior officials at the airport and a special security cabinet meeting had been called, a defence ministry official said.