Pulwama attack: How were badly mutilated bodies of CRPF martyrs identified?

New Delhi, Feb 15: When the JeM terrorist rammed car full of explosives into bus ferrying CRPF jawans, such was the intensity of the blast that badly charred bodies were strewn in 100 mts radius. The maimed body parts were thrown as far away as 80 to 100 mts from the blast site. How did the officials then identified the mortal remains?

Aadhaar cards, ID cards, leave applications and certain other articles were the only things left of most of the CRPF personnel killed in the Pulwama terror attack that helped their colleagues identify them, officials said, as per a PTI report.

Five CRPF personnel were also injured in Thursday's attack, one of the deadliest in Jammu and Kashmir in three decades, when a suicide bomber rammed a vehicle carrying over 100 kg of explosives into their bus in Pulwama district.

Officials said as the bodies of the troops were badly mutilated and charred due on the impact of the RDX-triggered blast, it became very difficult to ascertain their identities. Most of the slain jawans were either identified by their Aadhaar cards, force IDs, PAN cards or leave applications kept in their pockets and bags.

Some of them were identified by their colleagues by the watches or wallets they had on, a senior official said.

A good number of men, another official said, escaped death by sheer luck as they aborted their journey last moment. The officials at the Srinagar and Jammu bases of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) undertook the daunting task of making hundreds of calls to the families of the jawans who were part of the convoy to establish that none was missing and the identities of the dead were correct.

One jawan was found to be in Delhi while another had aborted the journey last moment due to some urgent work in Jammu, the second official said.

As the bodies were badly mutilated, they said, it took a long time for the doctors and the force brass in Srinagar to declare the number of casualties. The CRPF headquarters in Delhi released a list of the 40 killed personnel only till late on Friday evening after their identities were firmly established with the help of forensic profiling and matching them with their belongings that were recovered from the blast spot, they said.

OneIndia News with PTI inputs