People Were Howling And Crushing Each Other To Escape: Terror Attack Survivor

Two days after the harrowing Pahalgam terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir, survivors are recalling their chilling escape stories.

Tilak Rupchandani, a tourist from Nagpur, Maharashtra, who survived the attack, recalled the incident and said, “It was in no time that such a heavenly moment turned into an unimaginable hellish disaster”.

“I find myself lucky to have been standing exactly at the exit when the attack happened. It was a narrow exit; I was standing at the exit door, which was about 4 feet tall. When everyone heard the bullet sounds coming from the garden, people gathered in the hall, and the place became overcrowded. It was too crowded; we couldn’t see what was happening on the other side (in the garden). I pushed my wife out through the exit,” he said.

Rupchandani, along with his son and wife, headed towards the nearby jungle and walked mindlessly for around 7 to 8 kilometres away from the place of attack.

A local then helped Rupchandani and his family reach the parking area where his car was parked. The family took the vehicle and went to a nearby hospital to get Rupchandani’s wife treated for the fracture she had received while climbing up the hill when walking into the jungle.

From hospital, the family drove to Srinagar in their car and then took a flight to Mumbai.

“When we were climbing up the hill, I saw a man lamenting over leaving his dead brother behind without a second thought,” Rupchandani told ANI. “There were many people mounting the hill with us; everyone was trying to run away from that spot.”

He remembered the chilling incident where people were howling and crushing each other in the hall in an attempt to escape.

Arjun Krishna tells a similar escape story. Krishna, a resident of Trichy in Tamil Nadu, is one of the survivors. Before the attack happened, Krishna and his family had been planning to visit the place of incident.

“We were previously planning to visit the spot where the attack occurred. We were about 1 to 2 kilometres away from that place. But then we heard about the attack in Pahalgam.”

Terrorists attacked tourists at Baisaran meadow in Pahalgam on Tuesday, killing 25 Indian nationals and one from Nepal while leaving several others injured, in one of the deadliest attacks in the valley since the 2019 Pulwama strike in which 40 CRPF soldiers were killed. (ANI)