At least nine people were killed and 32 injured after confiscated explosives stored at a police station in the restive Himalayan region of Kashmir detonated late on Friday.
Most of those killed were policemen and forensic officials who were examining the explosives, NDTV reported.
Two members of the local administration were killed as well.
The explosion occurred at around 11.20pm as officials were examining the material in the compound of the Nowgam police station in the regional capital Srinagar.
“The identification of the bodies is underway as some have been completely burnt,” Reuters reported, quoting an unnamed source. “The intensity of the blast was such that some body parts were recovered from nearby houses around 100-200 metres away from the police station.”
The blast reportedly ignited vehicles parked nearby and sent flames high above the building.
According to the news agency PTI, there were small successive explosions after the main blast, which prevented immediate rescue operations.
Five of the injured were reported to be in critical condition.
“Due to the unstable and sensitive nature of the recovery, the sampling process, the handling was being done with utmost caution by the FSL team,” Kashmir police chief Nalin Prabhat said at a press conference, referring to forensic officials. “Unfortunately, during this course, last night around 11.20 pm, an accidental explosion has taken place. Any other speculation into the cause of this incident is unnecessary.”
He confirmed that nine people were killed while “27 police personnel, two revenue officials and three civilians from the adjacent areas received injuries”. “The extent of this damage is being ascertained,” Mr Prabhat added. “The cause for this unfortunate incident is being enquired into. Jammu & Kashmir police stands in solidarity with the families of the deceased in this hour of grief.”
The Nowgam explosion came barely days after a deadly car blast in the Indian capital Delhi killed 13 people. In the aftermath of the blast near the iconic monument of Red Fort on Monday – since classified as a terror attack – Indian authorities detained five individuals in Kashmir and blew up the family home of the main suspect in the restive valley.
In the days before the Red Fort blast, the security apparatus in Kashmir had conducted a sweeping crackdown during which some 1,500 people were questioned across the federal territory in a supposed attempt to thwart a “reorganisation” of militants, the Indian Express reported.
The explosives that went off at the police station had reportedly been found during the crackdown, which started in Kashmir after posters supporting the proscribed militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad appeared in Srinagar, and quickly extended to Faridabad in the northern Indian state of Haryana.
Indian authorities claimed the crackdown unearthed a terrorist network operating across Kashmir, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
The Kashmir police said they analysed CCTV footage of men putting up the posters which led them to Adeel Ahmad Rather, a Kashmir doctor working in Uttar Pradesh, who was arrested on 27 October.
They found an assault rifle in his locker, the police claimed, and his interrogation revealed a “terror ecosystem, involving radicalised professionals and students in contact with foreign handlers, operating from Pakistan and other countries”.
#BREAKING: J&K Police Top Officials tell me that the massive blast at Nowgam Police Station around 11:20pm tonight happened when FSL team along with Police and Tehsildar were inspecting the large Ammonium Nitrate explosive which was confiscated earlier. Casualties in the blast.… pic.twitter.com/67U143jOFg
— Aditya Raj Kaul (@AdityaRajKaul) November 14, 2025
The police subsequently arrested Dr Muzammil Shakeel Ganai of Al-Falah Medical College and University in Faridabad and allegedly found a large haul of ammonium nitrate and other chemicals used for making improvised explosive devices when they raided two homes rented in his name in the city.
It was apparently this haul of explosive material – at least some of it – that blew up at the police station on Friday.
A fellow Kashmiri colleague of Dr Shakeel at Al-Falah is the main suspect in the Red Delhi blast. Investigators claim Dr Umar Nabi was in the Hyundai car that exploded near the iconic monument but it is not yet clear if he was the driver. His identity was reportedly confirmed after DNA taken from the blast site was matched with that of his mother.
The Nowgam explosion took place the same day Indian authorities destroyed Nabi’s family home in Kashmir’s Pulwama. There’s no provision in Indian law that allows the demolition of a suspect’s property as a form of punishment but it is an increasingly common practice, especially in states governed by prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Authorities ordered out Nabi’s parents, brother and sister-in-law, who lived together in the two-storey house, and blew it up.
Nabi’s sister-in-law, Shagufta Jan, said the family had not heard from him since last Friday when she told him police had come looking for him.
“He called us on Friday, and I told him to come home,” she said. “He said he would come after three days.”
The Indian government on Friday declared the Red Fort attack a “terror incident”, a classification that could again raise tensions with Pakistan.
India routinely accuses Pakistan of supporting Islamist militants in Kashmir, where a bloody insurgency against Delhi’s rule is midway through its third decade. Islamabad denies the allegation.
The nuclear-armed neighbours fought a four-day military conflict earlier this year after India carried out airstrikes across the border in what it said was retaliation for a terror attack in Kashmir that had killed nearly two dozen people, mostly Hindu tourists from the mainland.
The fighting, marked by drone and missile attacks and heavy artillery shelling, left over a hundred people dead on both sides and pushed South Asia to the brink of all-out war before the US brokered a ceasefire.
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