I will never be able to forget, says first respondent at Pahalgam meadow after massacre of tourists

PAHALGAM: Abdul Waheed Wani (38) heads the ponywalla association of Pahalgam. He was the first to reach Baisaran meadow on Tuesday after a local police officer called him about the terror attack. Standing on the mud track that leads to the meadow, he says he took a shorter route, called the Ganeshbal track, to get there.

“When I reached there at 3.10 pm, I saw something I will never be able to forget. Women were crying, seeking help as bodies were lying at multiple places in the meadow,” he said. Wani said he dropped a message to other ponywallas appealing to them to get to the meadow help evacuate the wounded. He said only the relatives of the wounded and the dead were there. The others had fled down different routes after the firing. Around 3,000 to 4,000 people were in the meadow.

Wani is the same person seen in a video with whom a woman pleads to save her husband. “She was crying, saying save her husband. When I saw him, he was dead,” Wani said. He said a child was asking him to help rescue his father. “But when I went close to his father’s motionless body, I saw he was dead.” He said other ponywallas arrived and evacuated the injured. “One wounded person was unable to stand. I saw a charpai there that belongs to a person who sells goggles. We placed him on that and then four people evacuated him,” he said.

On the ground he saw mobiles, caps, jackets, bags, and footwear. “We didn’t touch them. They were taken by police,” he said. He said many bodies lay outside the meadow’s fencing. Wani’s younger brother, Sajad Ahmad Wani, was also with him; in one video he is seen carrying an injured tourist on his back.

Abdul Rashid (25) says they were around 100 ponywallas who were on way to rescue the wounded when they were stopped. “The CRPF didn’t allow us to move forward,” he said. The CRPF camp is at the meadow’s base, about five km down a track traversed on foot. Wani justified the CRPF action, saying, “No one had a clue about what was going at the meadow so they rightly didn’t allow them.”