An army court has sentenced a captain to life imprisonment for killing three youths in a ‘staged encounter’ in Shopian district’s Amshipora area on July 18, 2020.
Captain Bhoopendra Singh was accused of killing Imtiyaz Ahmed, Abrar Ahmed and Mohammad Ibrar, all from Rajouri’s Kandi area and passing them off as ‘militants’.
The court held that Singh, of the Army’s 62 Rashtriya Rifles then based in South Kashmir’s Shopian district, “exceeded powers vested under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA)” during the encounter.
The families of the deceased expressed their gratitude to Lt Governor Manoj Sinha for ensuring that the accused faced punishment but added that only 50 percent justice had been delivered.
A Special Investigation Team (SIT) led by deputy superintendent of police Wajahat Hussain, was set up by the Jammu and Kashmir police for looking into the matter.
It found that the victims had walked on foot all the way from Rajouri to Shopian looking for work at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when they went missing after renting a room in Shopian’s Chowgam village, reports The Wire.
The investigation found that three persons, including two civilians, Tabish Nazir Malik, a resident of Shopian and an army informer, and Bilal Lone, who lives in Pulwama and has turned approver in the case, responsible for hatching a conspiracy to kill the three cousins who belong to poor families in Rajouri’s Tarkassi village, as quoted in The Wire.
The 1,400-page chargesheet by the Jammu and Kashmir police states that the victims were taken to Amshipora and killed in a makeshift building in an orchard in the wee hours of 18 July, 2020, for monetary benefits.
‘I am happy that a senior Army officer has finally gone behind the bars for killing three innocent children, including my son, and for that I am extremely thankful to L-G sahib,’’ said Mohammad Yousuf, father of Abrar Ahmed.
“I wanted him to be hanged, but while undergoing life imprisonment, he will die every day,” he added.
He said the L-G had promised a government job to his deceased son’s wife Shaheen Akhtar, but after around three years, the promise is yet to be fulfilled.
“The administration paid us Rs 5 lakh (Rs 1.5 lakh each to the deceased’s parents and his wife and Rs 2 lakh deposited in the name of his 5-year-old son Aneesh Ahmed),” Abrar Ahmed said. The money, he said, was spent in attending proceedings before Army and civil courts in Shopian.
Captain Singh used the alias ‘Aslam’, a Muslim name, to build a rapport with locals in the Chowgam area of Shopian where the accused army unit was deployed. He had claimed before his superiors that he recovered a huge cache of arms and ammunition from the three youngsters after the encounter, reports The Wire.
But the J&K police distanced itself from the Amshipora operation, which it said was carried out on an army input and that its forces joined “only later” which led to suspicion.
The three deceased youngsters were buried in a graveyard in North Kashmir and their bodies were exhumed and returned to their families on October 3, 2020.
Abrar Ahmed who had come home at Tirkasi village from Kuwait two months before his killing, had gone to Shopian along with his brother-in-law Mohammad Ibrar and Imtiaz Ahmed to work as coolies in apple orchards. He is survived by his old parents, wife and a minor son.