SRINAGAR: Inspector Asrar Ahmad Shah called his cousin at 10.50pm on Friday, asking him to wait on the highway so they could drive home to Kupwara together after work. Thirty minutes later, an explosion ripped through Srinagar’s Nowgam police station, killing Asrar and eight others. The victims were police officers, forensic personnel, revenue officials and a tailor, all between 30 and 45.The cousin who had waited for Asrar spent the night visiting Srinagar hospitals before finding his body in the police mortuary the next morning. By then, social media was flooded with hashtags of heartbreak and outrage over yet another of Kashmir’s recurring tragedies.Asrar, 37, was an MBA from the University of Kashmir who joined J&K Police in 2010. He was a father of three.A video of a young man playing with his infant daughter at home bore the caption, “His daughter’s giggles still echo in that room…She waited for her father to return.”That was 33-year-old Arshad Ahmad Shah, a Crime Branch photographer from Kulgam. Arshad, a father of two, lost his brother in a road accident. His father is a retired cop.Javaid Mansoor Rather, 40, from Tral, was an MA from the same university who changed tracks to specialise in crime photography and join the police force as a constable four years ago. Naib tehsildar Muzaffer Ahmad Khan, 33, from Soibug, did his postgraduation in sports physiotherapy at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia before joining govt service in 2020. Another colleague in the revenue department, Suhail Ahmad Rather, was killed in the explosion.Constables Aijaz Ahmad and Mohammad Amin were both old hands in forensic investigation at FSL, Srinagar. Showkat Ahmad Sheikh worked as a laboratory assistant there.Tailor Mohammad Shafi Parray was the odd one out. He had been called to Nowgam police station, located in Srinagar’s Sheikh Ul Alam neighbourhood, to assist in “sample collection”.The blast occurred at 11.20pm Friday, tearing through the building and wounding 30 others, including 27 cops, two revenue officials and three civilians. The station had been probing the appearance of Jaish-e-Mohammad posters in the Bonpora area of Nowgam on Oct 19, an investigation that led to the unravelling of an inter-state terror module involving several doctors from J&K and UP.Asrar, posted with the Special Investigation Agency, was to take over the JeM posters case from Nowgam police.As his body arrived wrapped in the Tricolour for his funeral at Shahwali in Kupwara on Saturday afternoon, about 100km north of Srinagar, his neighbour and former Army Captain Mohammad Shafi recalled a poem by Mosiah Lyman Hancock that his “brother” had shared on social media in Aug 2020, urging loved ones to remember a person’s virtues and happier moments after death.J&K DGP Nalin Prabhat and other senior officers visited the family on Sunday, hailing Asrar as a “committed, upright and compassionate officer who performed his duties with exceptional professionalism and dedication”.Lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha said the process of “sampling” explosives seized during the probe into the Delhi blast had been underway for two days. “There is no suggestion of any terrorist conspiracy or external interference in what happened at the police station,” he said.
