KISHTWAR (The Thursday Times) — The families of two Special Police Officers killed in Kishtwar district of Indian-administered Kashmir have demanded an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation, as the region’s opposition leader accused the police of sending the men into danger, in front of a senior officer.
Babi Chand, 57, and Rashpal Kumar, 45, both from the remote village of Kiyar in Dachhan tehsil, went missing on Wednesday on their way to a security post at Basnand in neighbouring Marwah. Their bodies were found in the Dachhan forest early on Thursday with multiple gunshot wounds, and their service rifles were missing. Police have since circulated posters of three local terrorists they are hunting and offered a Rs30 lakh reward for information.
“One was my brother, the other was my nephew. We have lost loved ones, but nobody is listening to us,” said Ramesh Kumar, Babi Chand’s brother. He asked why the two men had been assigned duty outside their own area when security posts already existed there.
He said about 45 security posts had been set up around the village after terrorists killed eight of its residents in August 2000, but that only four personnel now guarded the hamlet. Two more villagers were abducted and killed in 2004. The families have appealed to Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, who controls the police in the Union Territory, to order a CBI inquiry into the latest killings and into the earlier attacks, which they say were never properly investigated.
‘What kind of operational strategy is this?’
On Saturday, Tejinder Singh, the Inspector General of Police for the Jammu zone, travelled to Kiyar to meet the families and review the search for the attackers. In front of him, Sunil Sharma, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Leader of the Opposition in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly, questioned why the two men had been sent across a hill to help an Army post, armed with a .303 rifle and an INSAS rifle, instead of personnel from nearby police pickets.
“What kind of operational strategy is this?” Sharma asked, calling the decision negligent. He said security forces had reached the area only the next morning, and demanded that a permanent police picket be restored in Dachhan with the roughly 40 personnel once stationed there. A video of the exchange, in which he called the force “nalayak”, or incompetent, has been widely shared.
Shagun Parihar, the BJP MLA for Kishtwar, said the officers’ bodies had been carried to the village in a dumper truck without coffins, which she called an insult to men killed on duty. She has also said the two had received threats, and has called for action against those who help terrorists.
Promises of help
Deputy Commissioner Pankaj Kumar Sharma, who attended the last rites on Friday, told the families that cases for compassionate jobs for eligible dependants and for compensation would be processed. He said road links and mobile coverage in Kiyar, which has no all-weather road, would also be taken up.
The police have not publicly responded to the criticism. Troops and police are still searching the Dachhan and Marwah forests for the attackers.
