Five faces of Pathribal

BRARI ANGAN,ANANTNAG

With his green turban and henna-coloured beard,he looked like an Afghan. And perhaps that was why he was dubbed Abu Mua’z by the soldiers after he was killed in a fake encounter in 2000. At 50,Juma Khan was the oldest victim of the Pathribal fake encounter. A resident of Brari Angan,a remote village up in the mountains of south Kashmir,Juma had returned home from Jammu only that day and was planning to leave again for Jammu in the morning. But in the middle of the night,a knock woke up the Khan family. They were too scared to open the door. A few minutes later,they saw soldiers inside their house—they had broken a window and entered the house. “They told me they were mujahid and that they would stay for the night,” says Juma’s son Shakoor Ahmad Rather. “But I recognised them,I recognised their uniform. I told them,‘you are soldiers’.”

The soldiers then took away Juma with them,telling the family he would return in a few minutes. “They told us they had to go to Shangus village and that he would show them the way.”

Juma never returned. A few days later,his body came back, burnt and mutilated. And since then,Juma’s wife Mirza Noor’s nightmares have never gone away. “I have never been able to sleep since then,” she says. “Whenever I close my eyes,the image (of the burnt body) comes before me.”

Noor has kept three photographs of her husband in a tin box—one of his burnt body,one of his funeral and another that he had taken just days before he was picked up from his home and killed in the fake encounter in Pathribal. The photograph was taken by him at Hiranagar in Jammu where he had gone with his flock of sheep,horses and cattle.

“This picture gives me the reason to live,” she says. “I live seeing this picture again and again”.

‘We don’t expect anything’

BASHIR AHMAD BHAT,26

PETH HALAN,ANANTNAG

Gulshana Akhter doesn’t know anything about the Supreme Court decision on the Pathribal fake encounter nor does she want to know anything about it. She is certain that justice will not be done.

Soldiers had picked up Gulshana Akhter’s brother-in-law,Bashir Ahmad Bhat,from Anantnag town,killed him in Pathribal and dubbed him a foreign militant responsible for the massacre of Sikhs at Chittisinghpora.

Bhat had started a business with his neighbour,Mohammad Yousuf Malik. They sold sheep to butchers in Anantnag. That day,Bhat and Malik left home for town. They reached Anantnag but didn’t return to Peth Halan. The soldiers had killed them in Pathribal.

“All these 12 years,we didn’t get justice,” says Akhter,who is alone at her home in Peth Halan. Her husband,Ghulam Rasool,is mostly out of the village. “What should we expect now? We don’t expect anything.”

‘They have spilled the blood of innocents’

JUMA KHAN (38)

BRARI ANGAN,ANANTNAG

The night the soldiers picked up the older Juma Khan,they also picked up a younger Juma Khan from the same village,Brari Angan in Anantnag. It was the younger Khan’s body that blew the lid off the Pathribal fake encounter. As the Army handed over the body of the 38-year-old labourer to the villagers of Pathribal for burial,Khan’s maternal uncle identified his body.

Juma Khan worked as a labourer in an ironsmith’s shop in his village. That night,soldiers knocked on the door of his house at 2 a.m. They had already picked up the older Juma Khan by then. “They (soldiers) told us he would return in two minutes,” says his son Abdul Rashid Khan. “I knew something bad was going to happen. The soldiers threatened to kill us and beat my mother.”

Khan’s wife Roshni Jan doesn’t want to speak. Days after her husband’s death,her 20-year-old younger son Rafiq Ahmad Khan was killed when the CRPF and police opened fire on demonstrators protesting against the Pathribal encounter. “Why should I talk,” she says. “How will it help us? It has not helped us in 12 years.”

But Rashid is resolute. “They have spilled the blood of innocents. One day,we will get justice,” he says.

‘Supreme Court was the last hope’

ZAHOOR AHMAD DALAL (22)

MOMINABAD,ANANTNAG

Every evening,Nazir Ahmad Dalal visits his sister’s vacant house to switch on the lights. It has been his routine for the past 12 years,ever since his 22-year-old nephew,Zahoor Ahmad Dalal,was killed in a fake encounter at Pathribal. The house has been locked since then,and Dalal illuminates it every day as he doesn’t want to keep his sister’s house deserted.

A scion of an affluent business family,Zahoor ran a textile shop in Anantnag. His father Abdul Gaffar had died when Zahoor was nine. Zahoor was the only son among six siblings and he shared the house in Anantnag with his mother. After he was killed in the Pathribal fake encounter,his mother Raja Begum shifted to her brother’s house.

That day,Zahoor had gone to the mosque to offer prayers in congregation. Everybody returned home but Zahoor didn’t. “Neighbours told us that he was seen in his maroon Maruti van in town. But when we checked the garage,his car was there,” says Mohammad Yusuf,another of Zahoor’s uncles who now runs his shop. “We believe the Army picked him up in a maroon van after the evening prayers”.

The family hoped Zahoor would return. But a knock on their door two days later dashed their hopes. “A villager from Pathribal showed us a half-burnt piece of Zahoor’s sweater. We identified it,” says Nazir Ahmad. “I went to the village and identified his ring and the sweater. They were burnt. Nobody could see his face,not even his mother.”

Twelve years have passed but Nazir says he still pays the electricity and water bills for the house. “If I stop doing this,my sister will feel bad about it,” he says. “By doing this,we feel the house is not empty.”

Zahoor’s uncles speak for his family because Raja Begum doesn’t want to speak about her son. “We keep people away from her,” says Nazir. “We don’t want her to be hurt again and again”.

The Supreme Court decision on Pathribal,however,has hurt the entire family. “The Supreme Court was our last hope,” he says. “But they made the killers the judges. We didn’t get justice.”

‘This grief will haunt me forever’

Mohammad Yousuf Malik,38

Peth Halan,Anantnag

Seventy-year-old Fata Begum says she will have to live with this grief her entire life—she couldn’t see the face of her son,Mohammad Yousuf Malik,before he was buried. That night,she had fought hard with her relatives to take a final look at her son’s face but they didn’t allow her because Malik’s body was burnt and mutilated and the police had forced the relatives to bury the body in the dead of night.

“I wish I had seen him one last time,one last time,” Begum sobs. “This grief will haunt me forever”.

On March 21,2000,Malik,a resident of Peth Halan,the last village of south Kashmir,had left his home for Anantnag town. It was a day after the Chittisinghpora massacre. Malik and his neighbour,Bashir Ahmad Bhat,sold sheep to butchers in Anantnag and he was going to collect the payment from traders. His wife,Haneefa Bano,tried to stop him. “That day the town was tense because of Chittisinghpora (massacre). We told him to delay his visit to the town,” she says. “But he didn’t agree. He said he would return by next morning”.

When he didn’t return,the family went out to look for him. The search ended when the family was informed about the Pathribal fake encounter. His brothers rushed to Pathribal and he was identified. The body was brought back to the village but it was burnt beyond recognition. Begum rushed out to see her son but the relatives stopped her. “I die every moment,” Begum says. “Every time I remember him,it brings death to me”.

The story so far

On March 25,2000,then Union Home Minister L K Advani was on a visit to Chittisinghpora in south Kashmir where five days earlier,unidentified gunmen had lined up 35 Sikhs in front of a gurdwara and killed them. Advani was welcomed by the local police and Army officers with good news: the five Lashkar-e-Toiba mercenaries responsible for the massacre had been eliminated in a “surgical operation” by personnel of 7 Rashtriya Rifles and the local police the previous night. Colonel Ajay Saxena,one of those accused in the chargesheet,and Deputy Superintendent of Police Tajinder Singh explained the “operation” using a detailed map.

Families of five men who had gone missing from the nearby villages of Brari Angan,Halan and Anantnag alleged that the police and the Army had killed their kin in a fake encounter,calling them the killers of Chittisinghpora. Protests intensified across Anantnag,forcing the government to order a judicial inquiry. On April 3,2000,the protesters marched towards the Deputy Commissioner’s office. Nine of them were killed and 35 injured in police firing,including some of the relatives of the missing men.

Under pressure,the Farooq Abdullah government suspended Anantnag’s Senior Superintendent of Police Farooq Khan and an SHO,besides ordering an exhumation of the bodies and DNA tests to ascertain their identities.

On April 6,2000,a team of forensic experts from the Government Medical College,Srinagar,exhumed the bodies to take samples for DNA tests. The men were buried in graveyards at Vuzkhah,Sumlam and Chogamm villages,which were miles apart.

On April,9,2001,the Deputy Commissioner of Anantnag,quoting the report submitted by the police’s Special Investigating Team,admitted that the five men were innocent and ordered Rs 1 lakh as ex gratia relief.

The police officers responsible for the killings were,over the years,reinstated. In 2002,when the issue of fudging of DNA samples in laboratories in Hyderabad and Kolkata came up,the J&K government again suspended Senior Superintendent of Police Farooq Khan. Khan was,however,reinstated again.

In late 2000,the Pathribal case was handed over to the CBI. It registered a case in February 2003,charging five Army personnel—Ajay Saxena,Brijendra Pratap Singh,Sourabh Sharma,Amit Saxena and Idress Khan,all of 7 Rashtriya Rifles—with abduction,murder,criminal conspiracy and destruction of evidence.

In 2006,the CBI filed a chargesheet in the chief judicial magistrate’s court in Srinagar. Before the trial could begin,the Army objected on the ground that prior sanction under law is needed for prosecuting Army officials; the CJM,however,turned this down. That court,too,had provided the Army with the option of a court-martial.

The Army filed appeals in an additional sessions court and the High Court. On November 30,2006,the additional sessions court rejected the Army plea that the accused couldn’t be tried without sanction from the Centre. Six months later,the Jammu and Kashmir High Court too rejected the plea. The Army then moved a Special Leave Petition in the Supreme Court challenging the High Court decision.

On May 1,2012,the Supreme Court gave the Army full discretion to choose between a court martial and a criminal trial for officers accused of killing five persons.