A video that spread like wildfire across Indian social media on Monday showed a happy tourist enjoying a zipline ride down the side of a mountain in the Himalayas – unaware that he was soaring above the brutal terrorist attack that claimed 26 lives last Tuesday.
The tourist, who was quickly tracked down by Indian media and identified as Rishi Bhatt, said he had no idea what was happening until near the end of his zipline ride, although he did find it odd that the zipline operator repeated the Muslim chant of “Allahu Akbar!” three times before letting him go. His wife, son, and four other tourists took the zipline ride before it was his turn, and the operator never said “Allahu Akbar” for any of them.
Bhatt told India Today on Monday that he did not hear the gunfire from the terrorist killers until he was half a minute into his ride. This produced a few moments of horrifying discontinuity in which Bhatt is smiling happily into his video camera, unaware of the bodies dropping below him.
“You can see in my video a man falling down. At that moment, I realized something was wrong. I stopped my zipline rope, jumped down from about 15 feet, and started running with my wife and son. I was only thinking about saving my life and my family’s life,” he said.
“I was enjoying my ropeway ride. My wife was shouting, ‘Kindly come down, kindly come down.’ When I looked down, I realized something was wrong. I jumped down and came out,” he said.
Bhatt’s wife is one of several survivors of the massacre who said the attackers let women go, but murdered any man who could not prove he was a Muslim by reciting verses from the Quran.
“Just beside my wife, there were two more couples. The terrorist came, asked them their names and religion, and then fired at them. Just because I was on the ropeway, my life was saved. Otherwise, if I had been with my wife, I don’t know what would have happened,” he told India Today.
“They were asking tourists to speak the Kalma. Those who could not recite it were asked their names and religion, and then shot. I saw 16-18 murders in front of me,” he said.
The kalma are verses from Islamic scripture, comparable to hymns. At least one other survivors of the massacre told reporters he was able to avoid being killed because, while he was not a Muslim, he happened to know the kalma and recited them while the terrorist gunmen were choosing their victims.
“The terrorists were dressed like security guards. While I was running, I saw two security guards shot dead, and they were not wearing any clothes. I am assuming the terrorists stole their uniforms,” Bhatt said, a detail that helps to explain how the killers were able to get so close to their victims.
The operator of the zipline Bhatt used was summoned for questioning on Monday by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), India’s top counter-terrorism force, and the Jammu-Kashmir police. The police reportedly interviewed the zipline operator shortly after the attack but called him back in for further questions after Bhatt’s video went viral.
Read the full article here