A day after Centre’s intervention and the J&K police’s assurance to provide security to mobile transmission towers, cellphone services have started limping back to normal in north Kashmir. Police say that more than 50 per cent of the cellphone towers, hit by recent militant attacks and threats, have been made functional across Kashmir. After the directions from J&K Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, J&K Police on Tuesday evening deployed security outside the mobile towers in several parts of the Valley. The United Jihad Council (UJC), an umbrella group of militant outfits operating in Kashmir, too had requested the telecom companies to resume their services. [related-post] “We have taken a decision to run the towers again,” said Shabir Ahmad, president of the BSNL Towers Landlords Association. “We took the decision after the United Jihad Council’s statement that militants are not behind the attacks and the assurances of security given by police.” But some of the owners, on whose land the towers have been put up, claimed that they were being forced by police to operate the cellphone towers, putting them at a grave risk. According to police figures out of 2,816 towers, 1,058 were affected after the threat from Lashkar-e-Islam. Police say that 609 out of 1,058 towers have been made functional, but 449 towers are still not working. In Sopore, 116 mobile towers out of 177 are still not operational.
