Some body parts were found in neighborhoods up to 200 metres from the Nowgam police station in Srinagar after the blast that tore through it late on Friday, Nov. 14, 2025. A Reuters police source gave that detail, and said some of the bodies were completely burnt.
Nine people died and 32 were injured, some critically. A cache of confiscated explosives went off while forensic experts and police officers were examining it. The explosion set the compound and several vehicles on fire. Smaller blasts kept following, which held back the bomb disposal squad, Press Trust of India reported. In nearby homes, windows shattered, the Kashmir Times said.
Why the explosives were there
The material came from Faridabad, a city in Haryana state near New Delhi, where police had seized weapons and a large quantity of bomb-making material from a suspected militant cell. Seven people, two of them doctors, were arrested. That raid happened hours before a car exploded near Delhi’s Red Fort earlier in the same week, killing at least eight people. Indian officials called the Delhi blast a “heinous terror incident.”
Jammu and Kashmir’s director-general of police, Nalin Prabhat, said the haul was brought to Kashmir as part of the investigation and was “kept securely in an open area” of the station, where the inquiry that led to the Faridabad cell began the month before. He put the quantity at 2900 kg of explosives and other material. A team was taking samples for forensic examination when it went off.
Prabhat ruled out foul play. “The explosion was an accident,” he told a news conference on Saturday morning, adding that “any other speculation” about the cause was “unnecessary.”
The dead
Most of the dead are believed to be police and forensic personnel, though identification was still under way when ABC News reported. The Kashmir Times listed investigators from the state’s State Investigation Agency, two revenue department officials, five people from the Forensic Science Laboratory and Crime Branch, and a tailor. Muhammad Shafi Parry, the tailor, was mourned by his sister in a photograph from the scene. Senior officers walked in the funeral procession for the policemen that night.
Questions about storage
The Kashmir Times asked whether so large a cache needed to go to Srinagar at all. Forensic work usually calls for small samples, it noted, and the forensic laboratory handling the case is in Chandigarh, in the opposite direction. It also asked why the material was not held by Delhi Police or the National Investigation Agency, who have jurisdiction over the Red Fort case, and who approved the move and what risk assessment came first. It called the storage of that much explosive in an open area of a working station a failure of safety protocol and said the answers should come through a thorough investigation.
The blast also came as Indian security agencies raided across Kashmir, questioning hundreds and detaining scores in the Red Fort investigation. Police said DNA identified the driver of the Delhi car as a Kashmiri doctor, and troops blew up his family home in Pulwama district on Thursday night.
Sources
- Explosion inside India-controlled Kashmir police station kills nine people, injures dozens – ABC News
- Srinagar Blast: Safety Protocols Under Scrutiny After Fatal Explosion
