E-Paper
Alleged Kashmir militant’s body exhumed 33 days after death in encounter
Mudasir Ahmad Bhat’s family were tipped them that he had been killed in the forests of Kupwara’s Kachama on June 29.
The body of an alleged militant was exhumed and handed over to his family on Tuesday, 33 days after he was killed in an encounter with security forces in Kupwara district near the Line of control (LoC) and buried there.
Mudasir Ahmad Bhat’s family in Srinagar contacted government authorities after a stranger tipped them that he had been killed in the forests of Kupwara’s Kachama on June 29.
The family says Bhat, 32, left home in January 2017 after an argument and took away his educational certificates so that he could find work in Saudi Arabia. DNA samples collected from his family matched with the alleged militant buried in the Kachama graveyard near LoC.
Bhat’s family had protested several times in July to press for an exhumation. On Tuesday, hundreds of people converged at Bhat’s Barzulla home in uptown Srinagar as waited for his body.
“Everybody is waiting to have a glimpse of Mudasir’s body,” said his elder brother Elyas Ahmad.
Two families from south Kashmir told the police in June that two out of the five suspected militants killed in Tanghdar in Kupwara district on May 26 were their sons. They identified the men as Sheeraz Ahmad, a resident of Pulwama, and Mudasir Ahmad, of Kulgam.
After their DNAs matched with the families, the two men’s bodies were exhumed from Tanghdar near Line of Control (LoC) on June 5.
Police said that Sheeraz Ahmad, 24, had been missing since September 2017 while Mudasir Ahmad, a government teacher, had gone missing after he travelled to Pakistan on a valid visa in March 2017.
