I
t was just past 12:30 in the afternoon. Lal Chowk in Anantnag would have been at its busies shopkeepers, foot traffic, a police party moving through on routine duty. Then the shooting started.
By the time it stopped, Head Constable Aashiq Hussain Qureshi was down, hit at close range by suspected terrorists who fired on his team without so much as a warning. He was 35. Colleagues got him to the Government Medical College hospital in Anantnag within minutes. It wasn't enough. Doctors declared him dead on arrival.
Qureshi belonged to Beerwah, a town in central Kashmir's Budgam district, and he'd been posted with the IRP 3rd Battalion for Amarnath Yatra security duty one small piece of the thousands-strong deployment currently strung out along the pilgrimage corridor.
That's what makes this particular killing sting a bit more than most: he wasn't caught in crossfire somewhere remote. He was doing exactly the job he'd been sent to do, on a road that feeds straight into the Yatra route.
Police moved quickly once word got out. Reinforcements flooded Lal Chowk, the area was cordoned off, shops pulled their shutters down, and movement in the nearby lanes was restricted while search teams went house to house.
No arrests yet, as of the latest word out of Anantnag. Nobody's named the shooters. The hunt is, by all accounts, still on.
Within hours practically before the smoke had cleared, if you want to be dramatic about it The Resistance Front put out a post claiming the attack.
TRF is widely understood to be a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba operating under a different name, a workaround adopted after Pakistan-based outfits found themselves under tighter international scrutiny.
They've made a habit of exactly this kind of strike: a lone or lightly escorted policeman, a crowded public spot, minimal planning required, maximum headline value.
There's an irony buried in the timing. The valley had gone through a stretch not long, but noticeable where things had quieted down.
Forces were busy with multi-day combing operations in the forest belts over in the Jammu division, chasing militants believed to be holed up there, and for a while the big Yatra-season attack that everyone half-expects just... didn't come. Until Wednesday.
Almost as if the day hadn't taken enough already, a second security death was reported hundreds of kilometres away near the Line of Control. Rifleman Sukhpreet Singh, 27, was on duty at the forward Mahadev post in Rajouri's Sunderbani sector when he lost his footing on the terrain and fell. He didn't survive the fall. His body has been sent for a post-mortem, and police have started the routine inquest proceedings that precede sending a soldier's remains home.
No bullets involved in that one. Just a mountain post, a wrong step, and gravity which is its own kind of danger that rarely makes it into the same conversation as terror attacks, even though soldiers posted along the LoC live with it constantly.
Here's the thing: Anantnag's police weren't exactly caught flat-footed on preparation. Ahead of this year's Yatra, which began July 3, they rolled out something called Project Hawk Eye round-the-clock surveillance stitched together from drones, facial recognition, and 416-odd CCTV cameras, backed by close to 670 companies of central and state forces along the route.
SSP Amod Ashok Nagpure was telling pilgrims just weeks ago to travel "without any fear."
And to be fair, most of that machinery is doing exactly what it's supposed to do protecting the base camps, the mountain passes, the tightly ringed stretches where lakhs of pilgrims actually walk.
What it doesn't reach, not with the same density anyway, is a regular market junction like Lal Chowk in the middle of a weekday. That's the gap the attackers seem to have walked straight into.
There's been no word of the Yatra being paused or rerouted.
Pilgrims are still moving. But you'd expect this a policeman assigned specifically to Yatra duty, killed on a feeder road into the pilgrimage route to force some uncomfortable questions about how thin the security cover actually is once you step off the main corridor.
For now, Qureshi's body is being sent home to Budgam.
Investigators are left working through whatever the scene at Lal Chowk gave them: spent shell casings, CCTV pulled from nearby shopfronts, and the shaken accounts of a market that emptied out within seconds of the first shot.
