Srinagar: Amid the mournful din of ‘khodayo, khodayo’ (‘oh God, oh God’), Rafiqa Bano turned to the female mourners milling around in the compound of her modest, double-storied home in Srinagar's Nowgam locality on Saturday (November 15) morning.

“He was a petty needleworker,” Bano said of her tailor husband Mohammad Shafi Parray, one of the nine people who were killed in the Nowgam police station blast on Friday night. “Unlike policemen, he didn’t get lakhs in salary.”

Parray, father of three, was the only civilian to die in the massive explosion that rattled Jammu and Kashmir's summer capital of Srinagar and parts of Pulwama district on Friday night.

The deceased include an inspector of the J&K police’s State Investigation Agency, three officials of the forensics department, two officials of J&K’s revenue department and two police photographers.

Sources in Parray’s family and locals who spoke with The Wire said that he was reportedly asked by a team from the Nowgam police station to help them stitch up exhibits of explosives and other materials recovered in connection with the Faridabad ‘terror module’ case earlier this week.

The terms of Parray’s work with the investigators handling the sensitive probe and whether he was promised any remuneration were not immediately known.

“I saw him returning home [from the police station on Friday] at lunchtime and then again in the evening when he said that he was feeling cold and had come home to get a jacket,” said a neighbour of Parray's in Nowgam, who wished to remain anonymous.

The distraught Nowgam resident added: “Life is so uncertain.”

After the blast, Parray’s family spent the night in complete agony looking for him as the rescue operation at the police station was partially impacted due to a few low-intensity blasts after the main explosion.

The family came to know about Parray’s demise on Saturday morning. However, medico-legal formalities delayed the process of returning his body to his family.

At the family’s home in Nowgam, barely 100 metres from the police station, a group of wailing women tried to comfort his wife Bano, who was pacing up and down the veranda, slapping her body here and there to grieve the tragic loss.

At one point, the anguished widow marched along with other female relatives and neighbours to the police station where Parray spent his last moments.

“I don’t want anything. Just return his body,” she pleaded with the security officials who halted the procession at a barricade that was set up to keep the police station out of bounds for locals and the media.

Numbed by the turn of events, Bano also turned to a group of journalists who had stationed themselves in the compound of the house: “You should ask them [the police] why they took him. He was a civilian. Why couldn’t they bring their own tailor? Was he their servant?”

A wreath-laying ceremony was held at the police headquarters in Srinagar for all the nine persons killed in the blast, after which their bodies were handed over to the next of kin.

Amid a pall of gloom, Parray's funeral was held at his ancestral graveyard on Saturday afternoon and was attended by thousands of people.

“He was a kind and honest man who went out of his way to help the people in need around him. Due to his good qualities, he was handling the donations for our neighbourhood mosque. The government should adequately compensate his family,” said Bashir Ahmad, a neighbour.

Besides Bano, Parray, who is believed to be the lone brother of four sisters, is survived by a daughter and two sons, one of whom works at a neighbourhood shop that sells window panes.

Witnesses said that the impact of the blast kept the residents of Nowgam, a congested suburb along National Highway 44 in Srinagar, and several neighbouring localities awake through Friday night as a massive blaze flared up initially and the mournful sounds of emergency services evacuating victims pierced the air.

Bashir Ahmad said that he couldn’t sleep after the massive explosion whose impact blew away several windows of the double-storied building that houses the office of the Falah-e-Aam Trust (FAT) Jammu and Kashmir in the vicinity of the Nowgam police station.

“I was sleeping in the other building. I thought it was a hailstorm,” said Ahmad, who works as a security guard at the building and suffered injuries in the face after glass shards from the shattered windows turned into mini-projectiles due to the impact of the blast.

The FAT runs the educational activities of the Jamaat-e-Islami outfit that was banned by the Union government in 2019 and whose members and activists have been rounded up in recent days after the November 10 Delhi blast.

An official probe by the J&K police has linked the blast in Delhi with the haul of explosives recovered by J&K police investigators from a hideout in Faridabad earlier this week.

Investigators were preparing exhibits of the recovered items on Friday night in Srinagar when the explosion took place at the police station.

Director general of the J&K police Nalin Prabhat termed the explosion that damaged several buildings in the vicinity of the Nowgam police station as an “accident”.

Prabhat said that a team of police investigators and forensic science laboratory experts were handling the recovery when the “accident” happened at around 11:20 pm.

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