At home of killed militant, questions over path make way for acceptance

On August 6 last year, the family says, he helped his mother in the fields, then said he stay overnight with his aunt who lives close by.

“After a while my mother tried calling him and his phone was off. I thought he may have gone to the gym and then to my aunts’. We eventually discovered that he had not stopped by either place,” Sartaj said.

On Wednesday night, J&K police said that it received inputs of militant presence in the Rainawari area of Srinagar. In the ensuing encounter, two Lashkar-e-Taiba militants were killed — Hilal Ahmad Rah and Bhat, both residents of Bijbehara.

A press card was purportedly recovered from the body of Bhat that identified him as the Editor-in-Chief of Valley News Service, a local news portal.

On Thursday, his family said the portal had no formal arrangement. “The staff was not paid and it was mostly just run on aggregation of inputs from his friends in the community.”

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His family said there were “no FIRs against him, he was never questioned by the police” to their knowledge and that there were no known run-ins with the law either.

The 24-year-old worked at a gas agency in the town not far from his house and helped his parents out with some land they own.

Police sources also said that there are no known antecedents before he went missing in 2021. The family had made appeals for him to return home. “Even the police told us that we should try to convince him to come back. But he never made contact and we had no way of reaching him,” his father Abdul Hameed Bhat said.

However, the police’s official statement after the encounter states that both militants were “categorised terrorists and part of groups involved in several terror crime cases including attacks on police/security forces and civilian atrocities”.

Bhat, or Rayees Veeri as he was locally called, had been running the web portal just from a laptop over the last four to five years. He had a BA from IGNOU and no formal training in journalism. “It was just something he was interested in,” his brother said, “Enough to carry his identity card even to his death.”

None of his colleagues were present at the house Thursday. Only close family members were allowed at the funeral at Handwara in accordance with the J&K police policy of not handing over militants’ bodies to their families. “He was the most polite and hardworking person in all of this village. We could have never imagined him taking the path he did,” his uncle Ghulam Hassan Ganai said. He said that he would tease Bhat about not going to the mosque other than the congregational Friday prayers. Sartaj added: “No family wants to see their children dying. Eventually an individual’s decisions are his own.”