An elderly man, who had been searching for his missing son for nearly two months, was summoned for the exhumation. He stared at the horror dug out of the ground and told the police what he had refused to believe all this time. “He is my son,” he said. Then he sat on the bare ground and shook.
As it turned out, the dead man, Abdul Rehman Paddar, was not a Pakistani at all, nor a militant. He was a Kashmiri carpenter from a village south of here. The Indian police are now investigating whether he was killed by some of their own men, for motives that could range from personal revenge to greed. A suspected militant’s body, after all, comes with a handsome cash reward.
S. M. Sahai, the chief of police for Kashmir, said his investigators were looking into whether at least two other bodies were part of the same ring; setups like the killing of Mr. Paddar are known here as “encounter killings.” Each of the victims had been killed in operations conducted jointly by the police and either an Indian Army unit or a paramilitary force that operates under army command, he said.
By the end of the day on Saturday, as the investigation snowballed, a total of five bodies had been exhumed, all in the area surrounding Sumbal, and their identities were being checked.
The exhumations have not only unearthed a deep well of resentment among the people of Indian-administered Kashmir, but have also forced the Indian government to face anew long-simmering charges of abuse by Indian soldiers and the police.
Kashmiris have long accused the Indian authorities of disappearances and extrajudicial killings; one local human rights group estimates that 10,000 people have disappeared since the anti-Indian insurgency began here in 1989.
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[T]roops have been blamed repeatedly for human rights abuses here, most recently by a 156-page report released last October by Human Rights Watch, which detailed dozens of cases in which, it said, the state had failed to hold its security forces accountable for suspected abductions, killings and detentions.
Among the most infamous of those cases were the March 2000 killings in the southern village of Pathirabal of five men, whom the army identified as foreign terrorists responsible for a massacre of Sikh civilians. The men, whose bodies had been burned and badly mutilated, turned out to be civilians abducted by the army, according to relatives and a subsequent federal investigation.
Human Rights Watch blamed the Indian government for what it called its “lack of commitment” to accountability and a series of Indian laws that shield soldiers in conflict zones like Kashmir. “This has led to a serious climate of impunity,” the report concluded.
