'By God's grace and quick thinking': How an Army officer saved 40 lives in Pahalgam horror - 'By God's grace and quick thinking': How an Army officer saved 40 lives in Pahalgam horror BusinessToday (2025)

Prasanna Kumar Bhat, a software engineer, has shared a harrowing account of surviving the deadly terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pahalgam, where 26 people, mostly tourists, were killed on April 22. "Yet another survival story from the tainted Baisaran valley in Pahalgam. We survived the horror to tell the story of what can only be described as monstrous act and paint the heavenly beauty blood-red with hellfire," Bhat wrote on X.

He credited "the grace of God, luck, and some quick thinking from an Army officer" for saving his life and that of 35–40 other people that day.

Narrating the sequence of events, Bhat said their group — himself, his wife, his brother (a senior Army officer), and sister-in-law — had postponed their trip to Pahalgam by two days due to bad weather. They traveled from Srinagar to Pahalgam by car, reached the town around 12:30 PM, and took a pony ride to Baisaran valley, arriving at 1:35 PM.

They spent some time at a café near the entrance, enjoying tea and kawa. Around 2:00 PM, they got up to stroll and take photographs. Moving away from the entrance turned out to be a lifesaving decision.

At around 2:25 PM, Bhat recalled hearing two gunshots, followed by a terrifying silence. "Everyone was just comprehending what had happened and the kids playing all around were still enjoying the best picnic of their life," he wrote. Moments later, a burst of gunfire shattered the quiet.

They took cover behind a mobile toilet installed about 400 meters from the entrance. "My brother knew immediately that this was a terrorist attack," Bhat said. Chaos broke out as people, trapped within a fenced meadow, fled toward the main gate — where terrorists were lying in wait.

Seeing a terrorist approach, Bhat’s group decided to escape in the opposite direction. His brother found a narrow opening under the fence and helped people slide through it. "He quickly assessed the situation and understood that fire was coming from the entry point. So he guided us and 35-40 tourists in the opposite direction," Bhat wrote.

They slipped through the fence where a water stream provided some cover and ran down a muddy slope despite the risk of slipping. Bhat described the horror of knowing nowhere was safe, especially for families with children and elderly members scattered across the field. "The worst part was there was no mobile network coverage in that area to quickly alert the police," he said.

Bhat and his group managed to find cover in a narrow pit under trees a few hundred meters away, where they remained hidden and petrified. Meanwhile, his brother alerted the local Army unit and headquarters in Srinagar about the ongoing terrorist attack around 2:45 PM.

"We stayed put in the pit for an hour petrified, hopeless, and praying for safety. We didn't know if we had to stay put or run in some random direction hoping to escape the death trap," he said, adding that the sound of gunfire echoed through the valley for nearly half an hour.

The attack at Pahalgam, for which The Resistance Front (TRF), a proxy of the banned Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed responsibility, is the deadliest in Kashmir since the 2019 Pulwama strike that killed 40 CRPF personnel.