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Mass Graves: HC lists case next month

KT NEWS SERVICE. Dated: 2/25/2017 1:13:14 PM

SRINAGAR, Feb 24: The high court has listed a petition seeking directions for DNA test of the bodies lying in unmarked graves in the Valley.
On July 25, 2012 the court had directed the state government to file its response to the petition. The court had passed the order on a submission by the counsel for the state, seeking more time to file response to a petition filed by a local resident, Zahoor Ahmad Mir through his counsel advocate Syed Babar Jan Qadri.
Sources in the court said that Justice R Sudhakar has now listed the matter for hearing next month. The petitioner seeks directions to the government for necessary steps to conduct DNA testing of all bodies in unnamed graves so that the body of his father can be identified and recovered.
The petitioner has said that his father, Ali Muhammad Mir, a 45-year old contractor, was killed in custody by the notorious government gunman Papa Kishtwari and his associates in 1996.
Police has already completed the investigations against the accused and has produced charge-sheet before the trial court, he says.
“The petitioner is struggling to get the body of his father since 1996, when he was abducted, to perform his last rites but his efforts have went waste and the State Human Rights Commission’s report over the existence of mass graves here has raised a hope for the petitioner, who has filed a petition to recover the body of his father.”
Mir, a resident of Brein, Nishat left home to buy some medicines for his ailing father Rajab Mir on June 26, 1996 around 10 am but never returned, his son Zahoor says. Next day Zahoor lodged Mir’s missing report at Nishat Police station.
According to Zahoor, his father was kidnapped and subsequently killed by Papa Kishtwari. “My father is missing since the day he was abducted and is buried in some mass or unmarked grave in Kashmir.” The petitioner also seeks direction for a compensation of Rs 5 crore.
Pertinently, in December 2009 International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice, a human rights group, on Wednesday demanded an independent probe into the unmarked mass graves in Kashmir and immediate halt to committing such crimes.
The probe was demanded at a news conference in Srinagar called to release the report which claimed that 2,700 ‘unknown, unmarked, and mass graves,’ containing at least 2,900 bodies, in 55 villages in three districts — Bandipora, Baramulla, and Kupwara — of North Kashmir have been probed. It claimed 87.9 percent of the cadavers in the graves were unnamed.
The group had sought intervention of National Human Rights Commission as well as State Human Rights Commission and maintained that the copies of the report were sent to the then Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and the government of India. “Government should not ignore the report and look into this on priority,” said Angana Chatterji, Convenor of IPTK. Dr. Chatterji, who is also professor of cultural and social anthropology at California Centre for Integral Studies, had said “Of the 2700 graves, 2,373 (87.9 percent) were unnamed. 154 graves contained two bodies each and 23 contained more than two cadavers. Within these 23 graves, the number of bodies ranged from 3 to 17”.