An encounter involving Border Security Force (BSF) personnel today jolted the Valley’s new-found calm when two innocent bystanders were killed during a shootout with a militant here.While the militant was critically injured, residents spilled on to the streets and the Srinagar-Baramulla highway, protesting the two civilian deaths and alleging that one of them was allowed to bleed to death by the BSF while the other was shot for refusing to obey ‘‘orders’’.Inspector General of BSF, Kashmir Frontier, Vijay Raman expressed regret at the incident. ‘‘It is unfortunate,’’ he said. ‘‘We are investigating how it happened.’’The BSF had received a tip-off on the movement of a J-e-M militant and set up two checkpoints on the Srinagar-Baramulla highway near the Boatmen Colony.The militant was intercepted, but he shot and tried to speed away. The BSF men opened fire, and he was soon incapacitated. He was later identified as Abdul Rehman, a Pakistani commander of Jaish.Eyewitnesses say the encounter did not end there. The BSF men apparently kept on firing, and among those hit was 28-year-old Sartaj, standing in his medical store nearby. Showkat Ahmad, a local who claims to have witnessed the episode from a little distance, says: ‘‘Two of them (the BSF men) downed the shutters. We didn’t know Sartaj was inside, bleeding to death.’’It was only when his brother went looking for him at around 2 pm, four hours later, that he spotted the body. ‘‘He had a painful death,’’ says cousin Ahmad Handoo. ‘‘His body was near the shutter. He had struggled to come out.’’A few hundred yards away, there was another family grieving another death. The wooden shack didn’t even have room enough to hold the coffin of 32-year-old Ghulam Nabi Pakhtoon, an autorickshaw driver who too died in today’s shootout.Showkat Ahmad, who also drives an autorickshaw, says he was standing with Pakhtoon near the site when the later was ‘‘summoned’’ by BSF men. ‘‘They were asking him to check the militant lying on the road. Perhaps he was scared and did not listen to them. Then there was a burst of fire again, and he (Pakhtoon) was lying on the road.’’
