Srinagar: A 32-hour gunbattle between government forces and two LeT militants, who hid in a building in Karan Nagar Srinagar after their attempts to attack a CRPF camp failed, ended Tuesday with them being killed, police said. Inspector General of Police (IGP), Kashmir, S P Pani said the militants who tried to attack the CRPF camp in Karan Nagar area early yesterday morning belonged to the Lashkar-e- Taiba (LeT) group.
“The materials we recovered from the site of the encounter suggest that the militants belonged to LeT. But the militants have not been identified yet and we are trying to ascertain their identity,” he told reporters at a joint press conference with CRPF officials. Pani said it was a clean operation without collateral damage, adding that it continued for so long as the building where the militants were hiding was a five-storey structure. A CRPF soldier was killed and a policeman injured in the initial exchange of fire with the militants yesterday. The operation against the holed up militants in an under-construction building in the heart of the city was carried out by a Special Operations Group (SOG) of the Jammu and Kashmir Police and the Central Reserve Police Force, a police official said. The Army was not involved in the operation, he clarified. The official said two bodies – along with weapons – have been recovered from the encounter site. Ravideep Sahi, IG-CRPF, Srinagar, said the forces recovered two AK-47 assault rifles and eight magazines from the site.
We rescued five families of CRPF personnel as well as a few civilians and once the sanitisation (process) of the area was done, the operation was launched,” he said. Asked if there were reports of more militants in the city or inputs of more attacks, the CRPF officer said the forces were on the alert. The gunbattle, which began yesterday morning, came two days after militants attacked an Army camp in Jammu’s Sunjuwan area, killing seven people, including six Army soldiers. Three militants were also killed in by the Army.