NEW DELHI: Twenty-six people were killed and 17 were injured when suspected militants opened fire at tourists in India’s Jammu and Kashmir territory, police said on Wednesday, the worst such attack in the country in nearly two decades.

The attack took place on Tuesday in a meadow in the Pahalgam area of the scenic, Himalayan federal territory and the dead included 25 Indians and one Nepalese national, police said.

Here is a look at major attacks over the years in India’s only Muslim-majority region, where Islamist militants have fought security forces for decades.

NOVEMBER 2024
At least 11 people were injured when militants threw a grenade at security personnel in a crowded flea market in the main city of Srinagar.

OCTOBER 2024
Six migrant workers and a doctor were shot dead by militants who opened fire near a tunnel construction site. The Resistance Front (TRF) claimed responsibility.

JUNE 2024
At least nine people died and 33 were injured when a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims plunged into a deep gorge after a suspected militant attack.

MAY 2024
Suspected militants opened fire on a tourist couple from the northwestern city of Jaipur, injuring them both.

FEBRUARY 2019
At least 44 security personnel were killed after a suicide bomber rammed a car into a bus carrying Indian paramilitary police in Kashmir. Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) claimed responsibility.

JULY 2017
At least seven Hindu pilgrims, on their way back from the revered Amarnath shrine deep in the Himalayas, died when their bus got caught in crossfire after two militant attacks on police in the area.

SEPTEMBER 2016
At least 17 soldiers were killed as separatists armed with AK-47 assault rifles and grenades stormed an army base in Uri near the disputed border with Pakistan.

PESHAWAR: Pakistan’s polio eradication program said on Wednesday a new case of the virus had been confirmed in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, bringing the total count for 2025 to seven, as a nationwide campaign to inoculate millions of children continued.

Pakistan on Monday began a week-long drive aimed at vaccinating over 45 million children against polio. The country, which reported 74 polio cases in 2024, has planned three major vaccination campaigns in the first half of the year. This week’s drive is the second one for 2025 while a third will begin May 26.

“The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health Islamabad has confirmed a polio case from District Torghar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” the lab said in a statement, saying this was the second case from KP this year and the seventh from across Pakistan. 

Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the last polio-endemic countries in the world. In the early 1990s, Pakistan reported around 20,000 cases annually but in 2018 the number dropped to eight cases. Six cases were reported in 2023 and only one in 2021.

But Pakistan’s polio program, launched in 1994, has faced persistent challenges including vaccine misinformation and resistance from some religious hard-liners who claim immunization is a foreign conspiracy to sterilize Muslim children or a guise for Western espionage. 

Militant groups have also repeatedly targeted and killed polio vaccination workers, including last week when gunmen attacked a vehicle and abducted two polio workers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. On Monday, one militant was killed when gunmen opened fire on a police party escorting a polio team on the outskirts of Wana, the main town in KP’s South Waziristan district. 

On Wednesday, two security officials deployed to protect a polio vaccine team were killed in a gun attack in the Teri area of Mastung in the southwestern Balochistan province. 

“Such incidents cannot diminish the resolve of the government of Pakistan to completely eradicate polio from the country,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a statement. 

“The people should not be disappointed but should protect their future by administering polio drops to their children. The anti-polio campaign will continue with full vigor under any circumstances.”