Suspected militants open fire in Sopore, 3 injured

They had visited offices of BSNL, Airtel, Vodafone and Aircel in Sopore on May 1 and ordered them to shut down their services in a week’s time.

May 25, 2015 01:07 pm | Updated 02:45 pm IST - Srinagar

A victim of the shooting in Sopore being taken to a hospital in Srinagar. Photo: PTI

A victim of the shooting in Sopore being taken to a hospital in Srinagar. Photo: PTI

Three people were wounded when suspected militants opened fire on a BSNL franchise outlet in north Kashmir’s Sopore town on Monday morning. The attacks have come more than three weeks after suspected militants had issued orders to all telecommunication companies to close down their operations in Sopore for providing intelligence inputs to the security agencies.

“The attacks happened at around 10.30 a.m. on Monday and all the three injured were working at a private telecom franchise. They have been rushed to the hospitals,” Superintendent of Police, Sopore, Abdul Qayoom, told The Hindu . “One of the wounded was the owner of the business while another was an employee working there, and the third was a customer.”

A senior telecommunication official told The Hindu that suspected militants had visited offices of the four major telecommunications companies - BSNL, Airtel, Vodafone and Aircel - on May 1 and ordered the companies to shut down their services in a week’s time.

“They were two people armed with pistols. They took two laptops from the Airtel showroom, one from Aircel, and one from Vodafone and gave clear instructions that we must shut our businesses and our mobile towers down,” an employee at one of the telecommunication franchises in Sopore told The Hindu .

The militants told the employees at the communication showrooms that they were providing intelligence inputs to the police and that the militants will not tolerate their presence in Sopore anymore.

“We tried to tell them that we are in sales department and we have nothing to do with the operations part, but one of them asked us to shut up and said that we were responsible for the killing of scores of their men,” the official said.

Some telecommunication companies had stopped their operations in Sopore after the warnings.

One of the wounded, Mohammad Rafiq, died at Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) hospital. Rafiq had bullet injuries in his back and doctors said that his vital organs had been damaged.

"One of three wounded people brought to the hospital died a while ago. The other two are being operated upon and we cannot say anything about their condition as of now," Dr. Nazir Ahmad Chowdhary, Medical Superintendent of SMHS hospital, told The Hindu.

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