CHUTTI SINGHPORA, MARCH 22: Where is my brother? she asks every passerby and nobody dares to answer. All know he is lying dead inside the Gurduwara compound. Nobody even dares to console her as she might also ask about other men of her family. Prakash Kour had no one left.Kour was crying and wailing as other bodies were being lifted from the massacre site in Shokeen mohalla and taken to the Gurdwara. Everybody in this village had lost a dear one in the massacre.``It was a happy village till Monday. Now our smiles have been snatched for ever,'' said Karnail Singh, a villager. ``Why have they done it to us?'' he asked. Nobody in the village could understand why has it happened as hardly anybody in this remote south Kashmir village knew that US President Bill Clinton was visting the sub-continent. But a Sikh leader, who had come all along from Tral town said, ``Why did they need a massacre to divert attention of Clinton towards their war''.As the angry mob was growing with the arrival of each relative from the neighbouring villages, this woman started searching for other men of her family. There was none standing in the crowd. She was running from one part of the village to another and enquiring about them. All five were dead and the bodies were already been shifted silently to the Gurdwara ground. ``She saw the bodies in the morning. In fact she was sitting with the bodies throughout the night,'' a Harpal Singh, a student said. ``She has lost her senses because of the shock,'' he said.Harpal Singh too has lost his uncle Charan Singh, who was a retired Armyman, besides his friend Bittu, 25. In front of the Gurdawara is the residence of an Inspector of Intelligence Bureau D S Mehta. He was also killed. The sarpanch of the village, Naseeb Singh was also killed.At the Gurdwara entrance, there was another massacre site. Blood of more than 17 men had turned the soil red. A young man with a saffron turban was putting stones around it so that people don't step on the blood. As this correspondent mustered courage to ask Kour what had happened, she just remembers a few armed men comming in Army uniform asking their menfolk to come out for a crackdown operation.
