E-Paper
Owaisi meets pm to raise unmarked graves issue
With mainstream Kashmiri politicians reluctant to raise questions about the mass graves, Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Thursday took the demand for a high-level probe into the issue to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's doors.
With mainstream Kashmiri politicians reluctant to raise questions about the mass graves, Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Thursday took the demand for a high-level probe into the issue to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's doors.
Owaisi met the PM at his Parliament office and handed over a memorandum to him in which he demanded that the Centre should initiate a process to identify the people buried.
The PM, Owaisi said, assured him that he will take up the matter with Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah since it was "a humanitarian issue".
According to a recent report by the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission, 2,156 bodies were found buried in several unmarked graves in dozens of villages in Kashmir.
The commission finalised the report — the first official statement confirming the existence of such graves — after a three-year inquiry by 11-member team.
The report also disputed the police claim that the bodies were of "unidentified militants" and called for a forensic investigation involving DNA identification of remains.
"According to some human rights group, around 10,000 people have gone missing in the past 20 years, out of which many may have ended up in these graves," he told the PM.
Owaisi, the president of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen, a UPA partner, also urged Singh not to allow the CBI to appeal in the SC against a recent Gujarat HC judgment that exonerated 12 accused people in the Haren Pandya murder case.
"The HC clearly stated that CBI had botched up the investigations. I request you CBI should reinvestigate the case. His relatives have constantly been saying that it was a political murder," he said.
