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Strike hits Kashmir valley for second day |
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July 21, 2000
SRINAGAR (AP) - All shops and businesses remained shut in a troubled town in Jammu-Kashmir state for the second day Thursday as residents accused Indian security forces of killing four local teen-agers in custody. Tension gripped Baramulla, 65 kilometers (40 miles) north of Srinagar, where nearly 5,000 residents came out on the streets after local police handed the bodies of four dead teen-agers to relatives on Wednesday. At the funeral on Wednesday people chanted anti-India slogans and police beat them with sticks to make them disperse. Shopkeepers pulled down their shutters and vehicles stayed off the roads to avoid being caught in violence. The four teens - Javed Khan, Sajjad Ahmad Gujari, Irshad Ahmed Lone and Mohammed Rafique Nazar - disappeared from Baramulla on July 10, local residents said. Police said the four were killed in an exchange of gunfire in the Uri sector near the cease-fire line dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan. But local residents and relatives said the teens were not involved in the 11-year-old insurgency in the state and alleged that they were killed by security forces in a fake encounter - an alleged staging by security forces of a gunbattle. "It was a cold-blooded murder," said Ghulam Mohammed Gujari, a relative of Sajjad Ahmad Gujari, one of the dead teens. It was the fourth case since March in which Kashmiris have accused government forces of killing innocent residents in fake encounters and alleging that they are Afghani and Pakistani militants who have crossed the cease-fire line. In earlier cases, the protesting residents forced the authorities to exhume the bodies and they were found to be people who had disappeared or been taken into custody. India accuses Pakistan of training and arming Islamic militants who have fought since 1989 to separate Kashmir from India. Pakistan says it only provides diplomatic and moral support to the rebels. India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over control of Kashmir, since they won independence from Britain in 1947. On Wednesday night, six militants and one Indian army officer were killed in an exchange of gunfire in Rajouri, a town near the ceasefire line 510 kilometers (315 miles) south of Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu-Kashmir state. Police said one of the militants killed was Mohammed Afzal, commander in chief of the pro-Pakistan militant group Hizbul-Jehadi-Islami. |