Nowgam Kashmir Police Station Blast: Families And Houses Around The Area Become Collateral Damage

Firdous Bhat’s house was damaged in the explosion that rocked Srinagar’s Nowgam police station on November 14, 2025. With no money or resources to repair it, Bhat doesn’t know how to repair her house.

“We have no means to repair the house. Our earnings don’t suffice for even fulfilling basic needs. I don’t understand how we can repair our house now,” says Bhat, pointing towards the splintered windows and the broken doors in the house.

Her husband earns a meagre Rs 10,000 to 12,000 a month working as a salesman, with which the family is hardly able to make ends meet. Now, with the windows, doors, and cracks at their house near the police station broken, the family has boarded up the windows with polythene sheets to survive the cold weather in Kashmir.

Following the blast at the police station in Nowgam, two houses have been fully damaged, while nearly fifty others have also faced damage to windows and doors. Hardly a house in a colony of over a hundred and fifty homes has been left without any damage. Keeping a count of the damages that he witnessed after the blast, Firdous Ahmad, 60, a local resident, says that there are some sixty-five doors and windows that have been damaged after the blast at his house, which lies in the approach lane of the police station.

Faiz Ahmad Ahanger, another local resident who has suffered damage to his home, says they are now unsafe to live in. “A slight earthquake can bring down the houses that have suffered extensive damage,” he says.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has said that the government will compensate the people for the damage. Earlier last Friday, a large haul of explosive substance that was recovered by the Jammu and Kashmir police after posters were found in Kashmir issuing threats to security force personnel, detonated at the Nowgam police station, leaving nine people dead and thirty others injured.

Police had said that they had made a recovery of 2,900 kg of IED-making material during the raids that were carried out at Faridabad in Haryana and in Uttar Pradesh.

Abdul Qayoom Gilkar, 50, says that the damage to his house was so extensive that it needs to be dismantled, and they would need to build a new one in which they could live. Recalling the explosion, he says the flames erupted from the police station after the blast, and since their house was closest to the blast site, it was the worst hit.

“We had a narrow escape. The impact of the explosion was first felt in the bathroom that lies on the police station side, which saved us,” he says.

Residents showed damage to both houses and their vehicles. At least half a dozen shops in the vicinity of the police station were also damaged in the blast. A local resident, Bashir Ahmad Dar, says that, besides his house, a vehicle parked in his lawn was also damaged.

Inside their house, Ghulam Nabi Bader’s vehicle sustained damage to the rear windshield, while several of his windows and the doors were reduced to splintered pieces of wood.

“The government should have immediately provided us with the compensation so that we could have rebuilt our houses, but it did nothing.”

President of the Bazar Committee, Wanbal, Mohammad Muzafar, says they discovered damage to their shops after opening them when the authorities eased restrictions on public movement. “Some five to six shops have been damaged, and the number could be more as people return to normal business. Due to the blast, the roofs of the shops have been damaged, as have been the windows,” he says.

Tariq Ahmad, a local resident, says that apart from the damage to their property, local residents are in “a state of trauma.” “I have three girls who are scared to return home. Whenever I speak to one of them, she starts weeping,” he says, outside his house, which was among the few that have faced extensive damage in Nowgam.