Pulwama encounter: Kiren Rijiju meets injured J-K cop at AIIMS

Union Minister of State (MoS) for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju met DIG South Kashmir Amit Kumar at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) here on Saturday.

Kumar, who was brought to AIIMS earlier in the day, is being treated for a bullet injury he sustained in an encounter with terrorists in Pulwama last week.

Speaking to media outside the hospital, Rijiju said Kumar is now out of danger but will take time to recover.

"I met the doctors and Kumar, who is a 2006 batch IPS officer. I am happy that he is now out of danger. But it will surely take time for him to heal as he was quite seriously injured," he said.

Two terrorists, one of whom is believed to be the mastermind of the February 14 terror attack on CRPF, were killed in a fierce encounter in Pulwama on February 18 in which four Army personnel, including a Major, and a civilian lost their lives, police sources said.

Among the dead terrorists is suspected to be Kamran alias Ghazi, a Pakistani commander of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) believed to be behind the deadly attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed in Pulwama, sources told ANI.

Kamran, who is considered to be a close aide of JeM chief Masood Azhar, had crossed over to Kashmir from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) in December last year, the sources added. He had been sent by Azhar to increase the terror incidents and involve locals in it.

The other terrorist killed in the encounter is a local, identified as Hilal, the sources said.

The encounter in Pinglena area of Pulwama district in south Kashmir was triggered after the security forces launched a cordon-and-search operation late last night following credible inputs about the presence of terrorists in the area. the police said.

As the searches were going on, terrorists started firing indiscriminately on the search party from a house, the police added.