'Women were crying, bodies everywhere': Will never forget what I saw, says Pahalgam native Abdul Waheed Wani

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 Ganeshbal track, to get there.

"When I reached at 3.10pm, 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 sent 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 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, adding many bodies lay outside the meadow's fencing.

Abdul Rashid (25) says they were around 100 ponywallas who were on way to rescue the wounded when they were stopped. "CRPF didn't allow us to move forward," he said. 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."