Eyewitness account of the Pulwama blast by Joduram Das (28), jawan in the 43rd battalion of CRPF:

Our journey from the camp in Jammu to Srinagar began at 3 'clock in the morning. The vehicles moved in a queue towards their destination. The convoy traveled for nearly 12 hours without any halt. There were two CRPF camps in between, but we didn’t stop.

It was extremely cold and it was snowing outside. There was no place to park our vehicles in the camps due to snowfall. That’s why we didn’t halt. We were really hungry. We stopped at a CRPF camp at Kaziganj at 3 pm. We were about to halt there, but there was no space for us there either. The camp was full of other battalions. Without any food, we were forced to move forward. By 5 o’ clock in the evening, we reached Pulwama. Just after our convoy passed Pulwama, the bus which was ahead of us blew up with a thunderous sound. We saw the bodies of jawans in that bus being blown up into pieces. Before we understood what had happened, the mudguard of the bus, crashed against the glass of our bus, breaking it into pieces. We understood immediately that it was an IED blast. When a blast of this kind takes place, even iron will turn into pieces. Only the engine of the blasted bus remained. The remaining parts of it fell 50 to 60 feet away in pieces. We had heard of such IED blasts in Maoist-affected areas, but never in Jammu and Kashmir.