Militants hurl grenade at beauty parlour in Kashmir

A girl sustained minor injuries after unidentified militants lobbed a grenade on a beauty parlour in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district on Thursday.

Superintendent of Police (SP) Pulwama Chaudhary Aslam said that a girl sustained minor splinter injuries in the attack in Rajpora Chowk of Pulwama town, 32 kms from here at around 3:45 pm. “Beauty parlor was the target. The grenade attacks are carried by militants and we are investigating the case,” he told DH.

Reports said soon after the attack, security forces launched a manhunt to nab the attackers. No militant organization claimed the responsibility for the attack till evening.

In the past radical women's outfit Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of Faith) have several times threatened the owners of beauty parlors to either shut down their business or face consequences. In early 1990's when insurgency broke out in Kashmir, Dukhtaran-e-Millat launched a campaign to force women in Srinagar to wear the veil and threw paint on those who failed to comply.

In January 1990 gun-totting militants forcibly closed cinema halls, liquor shops and beauty parlors in the Valley. However, despite the ban, all these things continued throughout the past two decades.

Meanwhile, unidentified militants looted a bank in Marhama village of Bijbehara in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district on Tuesday. A police official said that the gunmen barged inside the branch of Jammu and Kashmir Bank in Marhama and looted over Rs five lakh.

He said that police and other security agencies have launched a search operation to nab the looters.

Kashmir witnessed a surge in bank looting cases ever since demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 8 last year. There have been more than a dozen bank robberies in Kashmir especially in southern districts since last November.

However, today’s incident was the first bank robbery in last almost two and half months. On July 31, militants had looted more than Rs five lakh from a bank in Bijbehara. Earlier, on May 3, militants had looted two banks in southern Pulwama district in one day forcing, banks in Kashmir to stop cash transactions at 40 branches in vulnerable areas of Pulwama and Shopian districts.