Jammu & Kashmir blast | A tailor’s last evening: How a quiet man became the unlikeliest victim

Srinagar: The cries outside Mohammad Shafi Parray’s Nowgam home on Srinagar outskirts rose long before his body reached the lane. The 47-year-old tailor-master — a man known for his soft voice, steady hands, and worn-out sewing machine — was coming home for the last time.
Just a few hundred metres away stood the Nowgam Police Station, where an accidental blast late Friday night killed nine people and injured 30 others. Among those who perished was Parray — the lone breadwinner of his family of five.

The explosion occurred during the investigation of a recently busted what investigators call white collar terror module linked to one of the biggest explosive hauls in recent years.
The probe had begun innocuously in mid-October, when Jaish-e-Mohammad posters appeared in parts of Nowgam. Police filed an FIR — which unexpectedly opened a trail stretching from Srinagar to Delhi to Haryana.

The same network was soon connected to the Red Fort car blast in Delhi. The deeper police dug, the clearer the plot became: a “white-collar module” involving professionals, including some doctors who were later arrested.
Their questioning eventually led investigators to Faridabad, where 2,900 kilograms of explosives — powerful enough to cause mass-casualty devastation — were recovered. A portion of this material was brought to Srinagar for forensic examination. It was during this delicate sample analysis that the accidental blast took place.

And caught in this chain, completely by chance, was a tailor. On Friday morning, Parray was asked by the police to assist investigators in handling the seized material. He was known for his skill with fine, precise work — and he agreed, believing it was just another job, another day of earning.
He returned home twice that day — once for Friday prayers and then again for dinner. “He ate in a hurry,” one of his relatives recalled, with voice breaking. “He said he had to go back to help them complete the remaining samples.”

Parray wore warm clothes, kissed his daughter lightly on her head, told his sons to sleep early, and stepped out into the winter night, he added.
No one in the family knew they were seeing him alive for the last time. Around 11:20 p.m., while forensic teams and policemen were examining the explosives brought from Faridabad, a sudden explosion tore through the Nowgam Police Station.

The tremor spread across neighbourhoods. Phones began ringing. Panic rippled through Nowgam. By midnight, the devastating truth reached the Parray home: Shafi had been injured and was in hospital.
By sunrise, their lane overflowed with mourners. Women cried openly, men struggled to contain their grief. His sisters collapsed repeatedly as neighbours tried to hold them up. Inside the house, the air was thick with wails and disbelief.

By afternoon Parray’s body reached home from hospital with his wife and daughters unable to comprehend how a man who stitched clothes for a living had ended up a casualty of a terror-linked investigation. His three children  held onto each other as if afraid the world would slip from beneath their feet.

Parray’s sewing machine — still threaded, still warm from earlier that morning’s work — sat abandoned in a corner of his tiny workshop. It had fed his family for decades. Now it stood like a relic of a life cut short. “He was a man of character,” said a neighbour. “Always working, always gentle. He never refused a favour.”

He had no connection to terror networks, investigations, or explosives. He was simply a tailor who agreed to help because he was asked — because that was the kind of man he was.

But a tragedy that began with Jaish posters, spiralled through multiple states, and ended with the seizure of nearly three tonnes of explosives… finally came crashing down on the head of a quiet craftsman in Nowgam.
In the end, a large terror investigation produced its smallest, most heartbreaking victim — an honest tailor who never imagined the world outside his sewing shop could kill him.