JAMMU/SRINAGAR, 26 AUG

Relentless heavy rain led to a landslide on the route to the Mata Vaishno Devi shrine atop the Trikuta hill on Tuesday afternoon, killing at least 10 people and injuring 14, officials said. Several people were feared trapped.

The pilgrimage to the famed shrine in Jammu and Kashmir's Reasi district was suspended when the mountainside literally gave way and stones, boulders, and rocks came hurtling down around 3 pm, catching people unawares.

Rescue operations are underway near the Inderprastha Bhojnalaya at Adhkwari, officials said. The landslide struck at a point about halfway along the winding 12-km trek from Katra to the hilltop shrine.

There are two routes up to the shrine -- while the yatra had been suspended on the Himkoti trek route since morning, it was going on on the old route till 1.30 pm when authorities decided to suspend it till further orders in view of the torrential rain.

"In an unfortunate incident of landslide at Adhkwari, 5 people have lost their lives and 14 others have been injured. Rescue operations underway," the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board said in a post on X.

Kiran, from Mohali in Punjab, was among those caught in the hail of stones, trees and boulders.

"I was coming down the hill after performing darshan when people started shouting. I saw stones falling down. I rushed to safety but was injured," Kiran told reporters from a hospital bed in Katra.

"We were a group of five out of which three are injured," added another girl, traumatised by her narrow escape.

Three days of continuous rain has wreaked havoc across many parts of Jammu.

Call, mobile internet outage across all service providers in J-K amid heavy rains

Network outages were reported across all service providers in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday due to damage to optical fibres at multiple places amid heavy rainfall, officials said.

Technical teams have been dispatched to locate the faults and rectify them, they said.

Officials said calls are not going through and mobile internet has stopped working across all network service providers due to "fiber cuts at multiple locations".

Fiber services and landline services on state-owned BSNL were also down. The outage caused problems among people as mobiles showed no signals, they said.

Telecom operators said it was a network issue due to "multiple fibre cuts" at various places, including in Jammu, Srinagar as well as Shimla. "We will try to restore the network and services as fast as possible," they added.