Shopian Fake Encounter Shows Troops’ Involvement in Genocide

September 20th, 2020

Awake Goy

Srinagar, September 19 (KMS): In Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference has said that the admission of killing of three Rajouri labourers by Indian Army in a fake encounter in Shopian vindicates the fact that Indian forces are committing genocide of Kashmiris.

Indian Army had killed three youth during a cordon and search operation in Amshipora area of Shopian on July 18 and passed them on as “unidentified militants”. Days later, the victims were identified by their families through the pictures released by the Indian Army as Imtiyaz Ahmed, Abrar Ahmed and Muhammad Ibrar from Rajouri who had gone to Kashmir Valley in search of work. The army, yesterday, admitted that the youth hailed from Rajouri.

The APHC spokesman in a statement in Srinagar said that Indian forces’ personnel were killing innocent youth in staged encounters in IIOJK to suppress the Kashmiris’ ongoing struggle for securing their right to self-determination. He demanded an impartial investigation into all incidents of killings by the troops in IIOJK through an impartial international agency to bring the perpetrators to book.

The family members of the martyred labourers have demanded capital punishment for the killer soldiers. The uncle of the slain youth, Lal Hussain, in a media interview said that they had three demands; return of the dead bodies, capital punishment for those involved in this fake encounter and rebuttal of remarks that the youth were militants. The Chairman of International Forum for Justice and Human Rights, Muhammed Ahsan Untoo, in his statement said Shopian fake encounter is not the first of its kind but there were thousands of such heinous acts perpetrated by Indian forces in the territory.

Political analysts, Kashmir watchers and observers talking to the KMS over phone from Srinagar while seeking anonymity due to reprisal from the Indian authorities said that the ongoing use of pellet firing shotguns by Indian troops in IIOJK constituted a war crime. They noted that there is no other country in the world except India which uses shotguns for crowd control. And even within India, they added, there is no place where shotguns are regularly and consistently used for crowd control.

The Chairman of Tehreek-e-Muzahamat, Bilal Siddiqi, in a statement in Srinagar termed the implicating of Dr Bilquis Shah, the wife of illegally detained senior APHC leader Shabbir Ahmed Shah, in a false case as a fresh example of political vendetta by the Indian authorities. Jammu and Kashmir Tehreek-e-Wahdat-e-Islami in a statement in Srinagar while reacting to the economic package announced by the Indian authorities for IIOJK maintained that the Kashmiris were not making sacrifices for perks and privileges but for freedom from India’s illegal occupation of their homeland.

Indian police and troops arrested five youth from Pulwama and Rajouri areas.

Speakers of a webinar organised by Islamabad-based Kashmir Institute of International Relations strongly condemned the Modi-led fascist Indian regime for carrying out systematic human rights abuses in IIOJK. The speakers including British and European parliamentarians, human rights defenders, former diplomats and experts highlighted the plight and unending miseries of the half widows who despite the passage of several years were still wandering from pillar to post to trace the whereabouts of their missing husbands.