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Day after encounter, locals cry foul
SRINAGAR: Scores of people gathered in a narrow street in Srinagar’s Sarai Bala locality on Tuesday morning to offer funeral prayers in absentia to the two militants
SRINAGAR: Scores of people gathered in a narrow street in Srinagar’s Sarai Bala locality on Tuesday morning to offer funeral prayers in absentia to the two militants killed last night and they alleged it was “staged”.
Police said the militants who were killed on Monday night belonged to the banned outfit Jaishe-Mohammed and had allegedly rented a room in the area claiming to be from Kupwara and students of a local college.
Where the men and women gathered — near the spot where the encounter reportedly took place — there were stains of blood on the road, believed to be from last night’s violence. After the prayers, the participants shouted anti-India, pro-Aazadi and pro-militant slogans, condemned the killings, and alleged they were “staged”.
HT could not reach DGP K Rajendra and IG Kashmir SJM Gillani for comments on the allegations of residents, but according to Rajendra’s statement to the media on Monday night, police “had inputs about presence of two militants in the area”.
“They were innocent 20-yearold students. Police now say they were militant commanders. How can that be?” an agitated local resident, who participated in the prayer, told HT.
They alleged the “innocent students” did not have any weapons on them, and that one of them was arrested in the room and then brought to the road and shot while the other was shot during a subsequent search.
“Rounds and rounds of bullets were fired by the security forces while children kept on crying and we sat scared,” he added.
This directly contradicts the statement of an unnamed senior police officer, who was quoted as saying in Greater Kashmir, a leading English daily in the Valley: “The police party was fired upon from the house of one Ghulam Muhammad Hakim. The fire was retaliated triggering a gunfight in which two militants were killed.”
Another man who participated in the prayer service said: “Why doesn’t CM Mehbooba Mufti visit here where young boys have been killed?”
Hurriyat (G) chairman Syed Ali Geelani on Tuesday demanded an “impartial investigation by some independent agency” into the killings. “The Saraibala incident is a new record and achievement of Mehbooba Mufti’s police and according to eyewitnesses, it was clearly a staged drama of fake encounter in which two youths were killed,” the statement said.
