SEEKING JUSTICE & DETAILS ABOUT PATHRIBAL AND BARAKPORA KILLINGS

SEEKING JUSTICE & DETAILS ABOUT PATHRIBAL AND BARAKPORA KILLINGS

Decade on, justice eludes Pathribal victims

Posted Thu, 03/25/2010 - 00:16

http://kashmirglobal.com/content/decade-justice-eludes-pathribal-victims

KHALID GUL-Islamabad, Mar 24: “I know the troopers involved in the murder of my son won’t be punished. I don’t expect justice from the perpetrators. I only want to see the faces of killers once so that I would ask them the reason for snatching my beloved,” says Raja Bano of Moominabad of this south Kashmir town.

Her only son, Zahoor Ahmad Dalal, was among the five persons killed by the Army in a fake encounter at Pathribal village and dubbed as foreign militants responsible for the massacre of 35 Sikhs five days earlier at Chittisinghpora.

For 10 years, the house of Raja Bano is locked and she is living with her brother in a nearby house.

“Zahoor, my only son among five daughters, was only four years old when his father died during Haj pilgrimage,” says Raja. She says that he picked up a business at a tender age and was doing quite well with the support of his maternal uncles.

Recalling the fateful day, when Zahoor, aged 25 went missing, Raja says, “he left for evening walk never to return. His friends told us that while they were walking, a red colour van stopped near the CRPF camp outside our house and whisked him away. After running from pillar to post for five days to know his whereabouts, a villager in Pathribal handed to one of our relatives a torn piece of maroon sweater he was wearing. Soon we came to know that he too was among the five people killed in a fake encounter by the army in Pathribal.”

“I have kept every belonging including the clothing of Zahoor locked in an almirah and each time he comes in my dreams asking me to donate them to poor,” says Raja with tears brimming in her eyes.

Zahoor’s uncle Nazir Ahmad Dalal says that despite the investigating agencies identifying the culprits, they are still at large.

“Though the successive governments had assured of bringing the perpetrators to book, all their promises turned to be hollow,” said Nazir.

The other four civilians killed by army include Muhammad Yousuf Malik of Kokernag, Bashir Ahmed Bhat of Kapran Dooru, Juma Khan (son of Faqeer Khan) of Brari Angan and Juma Khan (son of Sher Ali Khan) of Brari Angan.

‘For the families of the five killed civilians, the past 10 years have been an agonizing struggle to forget. The mere mention of Pathribal means revisiting the day and the dreaded night of March 22, 2000 when their kin went missing, only to be exhumed a week later from jungle graves. For the two Gujjar families of Brari Angan, the horror started at midnight with a knock on the door. And for the other three, their sons disappeared, one after the other, in broad daylight. ‘When my husband was taken that night, I thought he would be freed because he was elderly. But they killed him,’ says Roshan Jan, wife of Juma Khan, who was one of those killed.

PATHRIBAL KILLINGS

Five days after the massacre of 35 Sikhs in Chattisinghpora, on 25 March 2000, troops killed five men in Pathribal village of Islamabad district claiming that the victims were “foreign militants” responsible for the attacks. Official reports claimed that after a gunfight, troops had blown up the hut where the men were hiding, and had retrieved five bodies that had been charred beyond recognition. The bodies were buried separately without any post mortem.

Locals and political activists doubted the official reports however, pointing out that if there had been a gunfight, some of troops would have sustained injuries - but none were. Over the following days, locals began to protest, claiming that the slain men were civilians killed in a fake encounter and were no “foreign militants.”

According to them, up to 17 men had been detained by the police and “disappeared” between March 21 and 24. On March 30, local authorities in Islamabad relented to growing public pressure and agreed to exhume the bodies and conduct an investigation into the deaths.

BRAKPORA KILLINGS

With no action being taken with regard to the promised investigation into the Pathribal deaths, the local population grew increasingly restless. On 3 April 2000, an estimated 4000 to 5000 protesters started marching to Islamabad town, where they intended to present a memorandum to the Deputy Commissioner demanding exhumation of bodies. When they reached Brakpora, 3 kilometers from Islamabad, the paramilitary CRPF men posted in a nearby camp and Special Operation Group (SOG) of Police opened fire on the protesters killing seven and injuring at least 15 more, of whom two succumbed to injuries later.

TAMPERED DNA SAMPLES

On 5 April 2000, Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah ordered exhumation of bodies from Pathribal killings, which began the next day. DNA samples were collected from the five bodies as well as 15 relatives of the missing young men, and were sent to forensic laboratories in Kolkata and Hyderabad. However, in March 2002 it was discovered that the DNA samples allegedly taken from the bodies of the Pathribal victims (all of whom were men) had been tampered with, when, according to a report from the Times of India, lab workers found that samples had in fact been collected from females. Fresh samples were collected in April 2002, which, upon testing, conclusively proved that the victims were innocent local civilians, and not foreign militants as government had been claiming for two years.

Meanwhile, the government headed by Dr. Farooq Abdullah ordered a judicial enquiry into Pathribal fake encounter case and Brakpora firing under Justice S R Pandian.

Later on, the Pathribal case was handed over to the CBI. In 2006, CBI found five Indian military officers guilty and charge sheet was presented in a local court. They included Brigadier Ajay Saxena, Lt Col (then Major) Bijendra Pratap Singh, Major Sourabh Sharma, Major Amit Saxena and Subedar Idrees Khan, then attached with 7 RR.

However, the army appealed in the Supreme Court maintaining that the state government had no jurisdiction to punish the army as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) was in force in the state.gk