At least 9 killed and 32 injured in an explosion at an Indian-controlled Kashmir police station

SRINAGAR, India (AP) — A cache of confiscated explosives detonated inside a police station in Indian-controlled Kashmir, killing at least nine people and injuring 32 others, police said on Saturday.

The blast occurred in the Nowgam area of Srinagar, the region’s main city, late Friday when a team of forensic experts and police were examining the explosive material, said Nalin Prabhat, the region’s police director-general. He ruled out any foul play, saying it was an accident.

The dead included six police and forensic officials, two civil administrators and one civilian, authorities said. Some of the injured were in critical condition.

The huge blast ripped through the police station, setting it and multiple vehicles on fire. According to the news agency Press Trust of India, small successive explosions prevented immediate rescue operations.

The police station blast came days after Monday’s deadly car explosion in New Delhi, which killed at least eight people near the city’s historic Red Fort. Indian officials called it a “heinous terror incident” carried out by “anti-national forces.” The car blast happened hours after police in Kashmir said they had dismantled a suspected militant cell operating from the disputed region, arresting at least seven people, including two doctors from Indian cities, and seizing a large quantity of bomb-making material in the city of Faridabad, near New Delhi.

Indian security agencies have since carried out a series of raids in Kashmir as part of their investigation into the car blast, questioning hundreds while detaining scores others.

Indian police said Saturday they used DNA to identify the car's driver and that he was a Kashmiri doctor. Government forces blew up his family home in the southern district of Pulwama on Thursday night, officials said.

In the past, troops have demolished homes of suspects they accuse of being tied to militants fighting against Indian rule in Kashmir as a punishment.

Police had brought the explosive material seized in Faridabad to Kashmir as part of their investigation and were “kept securely in an open area” at the police station, where the investigation that led to the suspected militant cell began last month, according to Prabhat, the top officer.

Prabhat said a team of experts was taking samples for forensic investigation when the blast occurred, calling it an “accidental explosion.”

“Any other speculation into the cause of this incident is unnecessary,” he said.

The blast could be heard from miles away in Srinagar, locals said. Some of the victims' body parts were recovered from nearby houses, over 100 meters (328 feet) away from the police station. Multiple houses also suffered damage.

“The explosion produced a deafening roar that rattled houses and flung open windows closed tight,” Bashir Ahmed, a resident, told The Associated Press.

Nearly a dozen relatives of Mohammad Shafi Parray, killed in the blast, assembled at his home in Nowgam and marched in protest to the police station, chanting: “We want justice.”

One of Parry's relatives, who didn't give her name, said the deceased, a tailor by profession, was summoned by the police Friday night. “Why did (the police) take him?" she shouted.

A local police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity in keeping with departmental policy, said the tailor had been called to the station to stitch bags for storing explosive material samples.

India and Pakistan each administer a part of Kashmir, but both claim the territory in its entirety.

Militants in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir have been fighting New Delhi’s rule since 1989. India insists the Kashmir militancy is Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Pakistan denies the charge, and many Kashmiris consider it a legitimate freedom struggle.

Relatives of Mohammad Shafi Parray, a Kashmiri civilian who was killed when a cache of confiscated explosives detonated inside a police station, mourn as they wait for his body outside his residence in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Saturday, Nov. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

A veiled Kashmiri woman is stopped by an Indian police officer before being allowed to pass a temporary checkpoint near the site of an explosion inside a police station in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Saturday, Nov. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

Relatives of Mohammad Shafi Parray, a Kashmiri civilian who was killed when a cache of confiscated explosives detonated inside a police station, mourn as they wait for his body outside his residence in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Saturday, Nov. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

Indian police officers patrol near the site of an explosion inside a police station in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Friday, Nov. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Yasin Dar)

Ambulances leave the site of an explosion inside a police station in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Friday, Nov. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Yasin Dar)

Indian security forces stand near the site of an explosion inside a police station in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Friday, Nov. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Yasin Dar)

A police officer, standing center and wearing black, talks to relatives of injured colleagues near the site of an explosion inside a police station in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Friday, Nov. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Yasin Dar)

HOMS, Syria (AP) — A year ago, Mohammad Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus as rebel forces pushing toward the capital threw open its doors to release the prisoners.

Arrested in 2018 for fleeing compulsory military service, the father of three had cycled through four other lockups before landing in Saydnaya, a sprawling complex just north of Damascus that became synonymous with some of the worst atrocities committed under the rule of now ousted President Bashar Assad.

He recalled guards waiting to welcome new prisoners with a gauntlet of beatings and electric shocks. “They said, ‘You have no rights here, and we’re not calling an ambulance unless we have a dead body,’” Marwan said.

His Dec. 8, 2024 homecoming to a house full of relatives and friends in his village in Homs province was joyful.

But in the year since then, he has struggled to overcome the physical and psychological effects of his six-year imprisonment. He suffered from chest pain and difficulty breathing that turned out to be the result of tuberculosis. He was beset by crippling anxiety and difficulty sleeping.

He’s now undergoing treatment for tuberculosis and attending therapy sessions at a center in Homs focused on rehabilitating former prisoners, and Marwan said his physical and mental situations have gradually improved.

“We were in something like a state of death” in Saydnaya, he said. “Now we’ve come back to life.”

Marwan's country is also struggling to heal a year after the Assad dynasty’s repressive 50-year reign came to an end following 14 years of civil war that left an estimated half a million people dead, millions more displaced, and the country battered and divided.

Assad's downfall came as a shock, even to the insurgents who unseated him. In late November 2024, groups in the country’s northwest — led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist rebel group whose then-leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, is now the country’s interim president — launched an offensive on the city of Aleppo, aiming to take it back from Assad’s forces.

They were startled when the Syrian army collapsed with little resistance, first in Aleppo, then the key cities of Hama and Homs, leaving the road to Damascus open. Meanwhile, insurgent groups in the country’s south mobilized to make their own push toward the capital.

The rebels took Damascus on Dec. 8 while Assad was whisked away by Russian forces and remains in exile in Moscow. But Russia, a longtime Assad ally, did not intervene militarily to defend him and has since established ties with the country's new rulers and maintained its bases on the Syrian coast.

Hassan Abdul Ghani, spokesperson for Syrian Ministry of Defense, said HTS and its allies had launched a major organizational overhaul after suffering heavy losses in 2019 and 2020, when Assad’s forces regained control of a number of formerly rebel-controlled areas.

The rebel offensive in November 2024 was not initially aimed at seizing Damascus but was meant to preempt an expected offensive by Assad’s forces in opposition-held Idlib, Abdul Ghani said.

“The defunct regime was preparing a very large campaign against the liberated areas, and it wanted to finish the Idlib file,” he said. Launching an attack on Aleppo “was a military solution to expand the radius of the battle and thus safeguard the liberated interior areas.”

In timing the attack, the insurgents also aimed to take advantage of the fact that Russia was distracted by its war in Ukraine and that the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, another Assad ally, was licking its wounds after a damaging war with Israel.

When the Syrian army’s defenses collapsed, the rebels pressed on, “taking advantage of every golden opportunity,” Abdul Ghani said.

Since his sudden ascent to power, al-Sharaa has launched a diplomatic charm offensive, building ties with Western and Arab countries that shunned Assad and that once considered al-Sharaa a terrorist.

A crowning moment of his success in the international arena: in November, he became the first Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946 to visit Washington.

But the diplomatic successes have been offset by outbreaks of sectarian violence in which hundreds of civilians from the Alawite and Druze minorities were killed by pro-government Sunni fighters. Local Druze groups have now set up their own de facto government and military in the southern Sweida province.

There are ongoing tensions between the new government in Damascus and Kurdish-led forces controlling the country’s northeast, despite an agreement inked in March that was supposed to lead to a merger of their forces.

Israel is wary of Syria's new Islamist-led government even though al-Sharaa has said he wants no conflict with the country. Israel has seized a formerly U.N.-patrolled buffer zone in southern Syria and launched regular airstrikes and incursions since Assad’s fall. Negotiations for a security agreement have stalled.

Meanwhile, the country’s economy has remained sluggish, despite the lifting of most Western sanctions. While Gulf countries have promised to invest in reconstruction projects, little has materialized on the ground. The World Bank estimates that rebuilding the country’s war-damaged areas will cost $216 billion.

The rebuilding that has taken place so far has largely been on a small scale, with individual owners paying to fix their own damaged houses and businesses.

On the outskirts of Damascus, the once-vibrant Yarmouk Palestinian camp today largely resembles a moonscape. Taken over by a series of militant groups then bombarded by government planes, the camp was all but abandoned after 2018.

Since Assad’s fall, a steady stream of former residents have been coming back.

The most heavily damaged areas remain largely deserted but on the main street leading into the camp, bit by bit, blasted-out walls have been replaced in the buildings that remain structurally sound. Shops have reopened and families have come back to their apartments. But any sort of larger reconstruction initiative appears to still be far off.

“It’s been a year since the regime fell. I would hope they could remove the old destroyed houses and build towers,” said Maher al-Homsi, who is fixing his damaged home to move back to it even though the area doesn't even have a water connection.

His neighbor, Etab al-Hawari, was willing to cut the new authorities some slack.

“They inherited an empty country — the banks are empty, the infrastructure was robbed, the homes were robbed," she said.

Bassam Dimashqi, a dentist from Damascus, said of the country after Assad’s fall, “Of course it’s better, there’s freedom of some sort.”

But he remains anxious about the still-precarious security situation and its impact on the still-flagging economy.

“The job of the state is to impose security, and once you impose security, everything else will come," he said. "The security situation is what encourages investors to come and do projects.”

Marwan, the former prisoner, says the post-Assad situation in Syria is “far better” than before. But he has also been struggling economically.

From time to time, he picks up labor that pays only 50,000 or 60,000 Syrian pounds daily, the equivalent of about $5.

Once he finishes his tuberculosis treatment, he said, he plans to leave to Lebanon in search of better-paid work.

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Sewell reported from Beirut. Associated Press journalist Omar Albam in Damascus contributed to this report.

A girl sits on a machine gun as visitors tour the "Syrian Revolution Military Exhibition," which opened last week ahead of the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)

A boy checks out military equipment as visitors tour the "Syrian Revolution Military Exhibition," which opened last week ahead of the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)

A Syrian man silhouetted by a digital billboard showing the date of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime during celebrations marking the first anniversary, in Damascus , Syria, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. The Arabic words read: "A history retold and a bond renewed." (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Wanted portraits of former Syrian president Bashar Assad are displayed in the window of a coffeeshop, in Damascus Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025, as Syrians celebrate marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Syrian men wearing anonymous masks flash victory signs, as they stand on top of their car with its front window covered by an Islamic flag, during celebrations marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)