Rights activist and the Chairman of Kashmir Insti-tute of International Relations (KIIR), Altaf Hussain Wani has urged the relevant UN body to help stop wanton killings and extra-judicial executions of innocent civilians at the hands of Indian forces in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
Altaf Hussain Wani in a letter addressed to Mr. Morris Tidball-Binz, the UN special Rapporteur on summary and extra executions, while referring to recent staged encounter in Srinagar, said that the ruthless killing of civilians was yet another sicken-ing chronicle of extra-judicial killings that has unleashed havoc all across the Kashmir valley.
It may be recalled here that the civilians, identi-fied as Altaf Ahmad Butt 43, Dr. Mudassir Gul, 40 and Amir Ahmed Magray, 22, were mercilessly killed in a fake encounter by the Indian troops in Hyderpora area of Srinagar after using them as hu-man shields on 15th November 2021.
“The ignominious practice of using innocent ci-vilians as human shields, getting them killed in fake encounters and then conveniently labelling them as “terrorists” is an age-old practice the Indian forces have been using as a tactic to suppress the indige-nous population”, the letter said, adding that it was quite unfortunate that miseries were being inflicted upon the people of Kashmir in myriad ways.
Terming Kashmir’s Lt. Governor Manoj Sinha’s magisterial inquiry order as a mere eyewash to evade widespread public anger, he said,
“The fact remains that 150+ magisterial inquiries into the disputed killings, in which Indian military and para-military forces were found directly involved, have been dumped in Kashmir since 1990.
No army offi-cer, even a soldier of lowest rank has been held accountable for the crimes they committed against Kashmiris”.
The magisterial inquiries, he said, had so far proved nothing but a futile exercise intended to hush up the matter.
Highlighting the simmering situation in the re-gion, he said that the fast-deteriorating situation demands an independent and transparent inquiry under the auspices of a credible international probe agency so that perpetrators involved in such heinous crimes could be brought to justice.—INP
