At least nine people were killed and 32 injured when a pile of confiscated explosives at Nowgam police station in India-occupied Kashmir’s Srinagar detonated late last night, a home ministry official said on Saturday.
Most of those killed were policemen and forensic team officials who were extracting samples from a large cache of explosives seized earlier this week in Haryana state, the Press Trust of India (PTI) said.
Prashant Lokhande, joint secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs, said the cause of the incident was being investigated and any other speculation into the cause of the blast was unnecessary, PTI added.
According to the report, those killed in the incident included three people from the Forensic Science Laboratory, two from the revenue department, two police photographers, a member of the State Investigation Agency and a tailor.
At least 24 police personnel and three civilians were admitted to various hospitals in Srinagar, PTI quoted officials as saying.
Samples from the recovered material were being sent for further forensic examination since Thursday, the region’s Director General of Police Nalin Prabhat said, and the procedure was being handled with “utmost caution” due to its “unstable and sensitive nature”.
“However, unfortunately, during this course (on Friday) around 11:20pm, an accidental explosion took place. Any other speculation into the cause of this incident is unnecessary,” the officer told reporters.
“The building of the police station has been severely damaged and the adjacent buildings have been affected,” he added. “Small successive explosions” prevented immediate rescue operations by the bomb disposal squad, the PTI stated.
Some of the bodies had been “completely burnt”, a police source told Reuters. “The intensity of the blast was such that some body parts were recovered from nearby houses, around 100-200 metres away from the police station.”
The blast comes four days after a deadly car explosion in Delhi, which killed at least eight people in what India has called a “terror incident”.
India’s anti-terrorism National Investigation Agency is leading the probe into the blast, but so far, officials have given little further information on who the perpetrators might be — and whether it was a homegrown group or had links from abroad.
Indian media have widely connected the November 10 blast with a string of arrests just hours before, when they claimed to have seized explosive materials and assault rifles.
Indian police have carried out sweeping raids in occupied Kashmir since Wednesday. There has been no confirmation that the searches this week are connected to the New Delhi explosion, but the raids represent a renewed effort by police to tighten security after the incident.
Officers also raided Al-Falah University in Faridabad, while security forces on Friday demolished a house in occupied Kashmir’s Pulwama district.
