At around two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, when mild sunshine and a gentle chill wrapped the Baisaran Valley in Kashmir, two newlyweds, Shubham Dwivedi and Aishanya Pandey, rented horses and rode up a gentle hill.
They wanted to catch what they had heard was a mesmerizing view: a lush meadow fringed by pine trees, with snow-capped Himalayan peaks gleaming in the distance.
Less than an hour later, Mr. Dwivedi was dead.
He was among 26 people killed by militants who approached a group of visiting sightseers and then opened fire. Another 17 were injured.
The massacre, which occurred near Pahalgam, a town in the southern part of Indian-administered Kashmir, was one of the worst attacks on Indian civilians in decades.
It was a reminder that the region, long contested by India and Pakistan, remains vulnerable to attack even after the Indian government moved to bring its part of Kashmir more firmly under its control in 2019, which brought years of relative calm and a tourism boom.
Victims, eyewitnesses and those who heard accounts directly from family members described scenes of chaos and horror. Blood spilled from bodies punctured by bullets as people begged for their lives. Video from the scene showed another married couple, the woman in a tan jacket, sitting motionless on the ground next to her dead husband, her wrists adorned with the red-and-white bangles that many new Hindu brides traditionally wear. She had been married for less than a week.
When Waseem Khan, a member of the region’s tourism police force, stepped away from the meadow on Tuesday to perform prayer ablutions in a nearby stream, “people were making merry,” he said.
About 10 minutes later, at 2:47 p.m., Mr. Khan said, he heard the sound of what he thought was firecrackers set off by the tourists. “Then I saw three people lying in a pool of blood,” he said.
He said he had helped hoist injured people onto horses, assisted by “pony walas,” or guides who offer rides to tourists, so they could be taken to safety. People scrambled downhill by foot or on horses, eyewitnesses said.
Mr. Dwivedi and Ms. Pandey, who married in February, were sitting at a table along one edge of the meadow where vendors sold tea and snacks, digging into instant noodles made by Maggi, a popular brand, according to the groom’s cousin Saurabh Dwivedi.
He constructed a version of events based on what Ms. Pandey told her father-in-law, who was part of their travel group. Several men in uniform approached the couple and asked if they were Muslim, leading to a heated exchange. Not long after, the attackers shot Mr. Dwivedi but told his wife they would not kill her. “Go back and tell your government what happened,” they said.
Most of the dead and injured were ordinary people drawn to Kashmir, a scenic region made even more wondrous in the minds of many Indians because tourism had been restricted there for decades.
Among the visitors on Tuesday were groups of families and friends, as well as young couples. A group of 17 salespeople were among the tourists, enjoying an all-expenses-paid company trip for hitting their sales targets. They were on horseback, not far from the meadow, when their guides heard about a shooting and ran off, abandoning their horses and customers, according to Suman Bhat, a member of the group.
They would have reached the site sooner, Ms. Bhat said, but the group had decided to have some ice cream. “Thank god, we stopped for ice cream,” she said.
Kashmir has a long history of violence stemming from the partition of India and Pakistan into two separate nations in 1947. Both countries lay claim to the region and have fought several wars over it.
The border between the Indian- and Pakistan-administered sides of Kashmir is heavily patrolled. India has dealt with a separatist movement in Kashmir, which it accuses Pakistan of fomenting. In 2019, India revoked the region’s semiautonomous status, a move the government claimed would help spur development in Kashmir and integrate it more fully into the Indian economy.
Since then, a combination of rising middle-class incomes, promotion by government tourism boards and high temperatures in many parts of India has made Kashmir’s cool summers even more attractive. On Tuesday afternoon, when New Delhi hit 104 degrees, Pahalgam, the town closest to the Baisaran Valley, hovered around 65 degrees.
“It is said to be heaven on earth, so anybody would want to go,” said Kunal Gunbote, whose parents were sightseeing in the area on Tuesday.
After the attack, Mr. Gunbote, 31, was able to locate his mother, although she was too shocked to talk. But his father was missing.
On Wednesday morning, when Mr. Gunbote reached Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, from Pune, another Indian city, he found his father in a coffin at the hospital, waiting to be identified.
Mr. Gunbote said that his mother, Sangeeta Gunbote, had told him that the attackers did not appear to be in a hurry.
“My mother said the terrorists came at leisure, strolling around and asking people their names,” he said.
“They took their time to kill, but no security was there for miles around,” he added, belying the government’s claims that the area is secure.
Mr. Gunbote said that his parents loved to travel and that it was their first trip to the region. Just hours before the attack, his father had shared vacation photos with Mr. Gunbote’s wife. “She was about to call him in the afternoon, but then it all went haywire,” he said.
By late Tuesday, tourists were fleeing the Pahalgam area, leaving hotel and tour operators frantic about the loss of business. On Wednesday, dozens of vehicles loaded with luggage on their roofs crowded the road from Pahalgam to Srinagar, where flights to Mumbai and Delhi were being added.
Mushtaq Pahalgami, president of the Pahalgam Hotel and Guest House Owners Association, said that nearly 7,000 tourists had been staying in Pahalgam at the time of the attack, but most of them had now left.
“The fear was so strong that by the morning, hotels were nearly empty, despite locals offering them to stay in their homes,” Mr. Pahalgami said.
