Victims and eyewitnesses described scenes of chaos and horror when militants killed 26 people in Kashmir as families, couples and friends took in a picturesque valley.
At around two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, when mild sunshine and a gentle chill wrapped the Baisaran Valley in Kashmir, two newlyweds, Shubham Dwivedi and Aishanya Pandey, rented horses and rode up a gentle hill.
They wanted to catch what they had heard was a mesmerizing view: a lush meadow fringed by pine trees, with snow-capped Himalayan peaks gleaming in the distance.
Less than an hour later, Mr. Dwivedi was dead.
He was among 26 people killed by militants who approached a group of visiting sightseers and then opened fire. Another 17 were injured.
The massacre, which occurred near Pahalgam, a town in the southern part of Indian-administered Kashmir, was one of the worst attacks on Indian civilians in decades.
It was a reminder that the region, long contested by India and Pakistan, remains vulnerable to attack even after the Indian government moved to bring its part of Kashmir more firmly under its control in 2019, which brought years of relative calm and a tourism boom.
Victims, eyewitnesses and those who heard accounts directly from family members described scenes of chaos and horror. Blood spilled from bodies punctured by bullets as people begged for their lives. Video from the scene showed another married couple, the woman in a tan jacket, sitting motionless on the ground next to her dead husband, her wrists adorned with the red-and-white bangles that many new Hindu brides traditionally wear. She had been married for less than a week.
