Srinagar, July 20: Minister of State for Home on Wednesday asked the police, army, and other paramilitary forces to draft a Standard Operating Procedure for avoiding the loss of human lives after IEDs remain undetected due to non-clearance of debris at encounter sites
 According to an official communiqué, the Minister convened a high-level meeting to discuss drafting and updating of a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) which was attended by the Principal Secretary, Home, B R Sharma, Director General of Police, Kuldeep Khoda, Special DGP CRPF, ADG BSF and GoC, Victor Force.
 The meeting discussed at length measures to be taken to rule out possibility of loss of life and injury to human life as a result of explosion of unexploded grenades and shells at the encounter site lying in the debris.
 Issuing instructions for drafting of Standard Operating Procedure, the Minister asked all concerned District Magistrates and Senior Superintendent of Polices to sensitize people about not venturing into any post-encounter site unless the debris was fully cleared.
 Several other decisions to prevent loss of life and property in such incidents were also taken during the meeting.
 Pertinently during first seven months of this year, nine persons were killed due to littered explosives. Among the deceased were five were children.
 According to the available details, three children of Muhammad Maqbool of Maloora on the outskirts of city were killed when they were playing with a live shell, after a gunfight in the area.
 In April, two persons were killed in Akhnoor area of Jammu when a shell exploded in a scrap shop. A month later, another youth was killed in the same area in a similar incident.
 A labourer Abdul Hamid was killed in South Kashmir’s Islamabad (Anantnag) district when a live shell inside the dead stock went off last month. On the night of July 10, two children died in Tral, Pulwama, when they were fiddling with an explosive. Police, however, says that they were investigating the source of the explosive.
 The JKCCS claims that more than 90 people including 80 children have been killed in these incidents since 2002.

Lastupdate on : Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:00:00 IST