Pampore encounter: Caught in crossfire, EDI gardener falls to bullets

“The family has been left helpless. Abdul Gani would earn few thousand rupees as an employee in the training institute and support his family. Except God, there is totally no one to support them now,” the deceased’s brother-in-law Manzoor Ahmad said.

“His son is a student of 7th class and the younger daughter is in 12th class. The elder daughter is pursuing post-graduation. They all have been left shattered by the loss of their father who would do menial works so they could read and write,” Ahmad told The Indian Express

Mir was a contractual gardener in the training institute for past four years and was a non-permanent employee of the EDI. He had been previously working as a labourer to make the ends meet and had been employed through an outsourcing agency in the institute.

“We were being rescued by the police from the hostel building when he was hit by a bullet,” Mohammad Maqbool Dar, an employee, who was inside the building when attack took place, said.

Doctors at SMHS hospital said the deceased had been hit by a bullet in the abdomen and was the lone civilian causality received from the encounter site. “He was very critical when brought here and succumbed to his injuries later,” a senior doctor in the hospital said.

Mir’s death has left the employees at the EDI’s Pampore office heartbroken with his colleagues describing him as a humble and religious person who would work hard to “make the garden clean and beautiful.”

“He was working as an housekeeping guy with the outsourcing agency and it was proposed we would take him as a gardener. He was elderly as compared to others and physically weak but very hardworking who would often be seen working in the lawn of the institute,” Zamir Qadri, former chief operating officer at EDI said.

A Facebook post dedicated to Mir by Sarwar Kashani, a former Communication Officer at EDI, reads, “You were the charming gardener who made our souls blossom every morning we walked into JKEDI campus.”

On Saturday, the gardener fell prey to the bullets in the same lawn that he looked after for years.