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Inquiry finds Indian troops did killings[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, Times New Roman, Serif, MS Serif]Pakistan militants falsely blamed Cover-up included false DNA tests[/FONT]
SHAIKH AZIZUR RAHMAN
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
[FONT=Times, Times New Roman, Serif, MS Serif]New Delhi—Troops hunting terrorists killed and buried Indian civilians and passed them off as Pakistani militants responsible for killing Sikhs in Kashmir, an inquiry by India's top investigating agency has revealed. When villagers' protests led to the bodies being exhumed, the army doctored DNA tests to show that the remains were those of militants from across the border, India's Central Bureau of Investigation said in its final report two weeks ago. Human rights groups frequently report abuses by security forces in the Himalayan territory claimed by both India and Pakistan. But this was the first case of its kind handed over to the agency for investigation. The bureau found four army officers guilty of killing the civilians. Hours before then-U.S. president Bill Clinton visited India in March 2000, 35 Sikhs were killed in Chattisinghpura village in Kashmir by suspected Islamic militants in army uniforms. India blamed Pakistan-based terrorists for the attack. Four days later, 17 Muslim residents from three neighbouring villages disappeared. Simultaneously, reports emerged that five Pakistani terrorists involved in the massacre of the Chattisinghpura Sikhs had been killed by the army. Juma Khan, a 45 year old from Brari Angan, was among the villagers picked up without explanation by the soldiers. "I thought they would not harm him because he was a family man and was not involved in anything," Khan's wife, Roshan Jan, said recently. Two days after Khan's arrest, the army said its sharpshooters had shot dead five "foreign militants" during a "ferocious encounter." There were no autopsies before the bodies were buried, but locals determined from clothing and personal items recovered at the gravesites that the bodies were those of missing villagers. As violent protests raged around Kashmir, local officials ordered exhumations. Although the bodies were charred, the army fatigues in which they were clothed were mysteriously intact. Relatives of a local cattle trader said his body was headless. There were no bullet wounds in another corpse. The chopped-off nose and chin of a shepherd was discovered in a grave holding another body. Farooq Abdullah, then chief minister of the state, ordered DNA tests to determine identities. But that plan came under a cloud when two forensic laboratories said DNA samples from relatives of the dead men had been tampered with. "In one case, blood samples were said to belong to the mother and daughter of one victim. But not only were the samples male in origin, both belonged to the same man," a senior scientist at Calcutta's Central Forensic Science Laboratory told investigators. In three cases, samples allegedly collected from female relatives were found to have come from men. Another woman's sample contained the DNA of two individuals. Two doctors involved in collecting the samples were suspended by the government, and a new team, headed by a senior police officer, collected fresh blood samples in April 2002. The new DNA tests established the dead men were "not foreign terrorists, as contended by the forces, but innocent civilians," a CBI investigator said this week. The agency concluded the doctors, under pressure from the army, had tampered with the first DNA tests. "We have irrefutable evidence of at least seven such fake encounters, where Indian security forces killed 13 innocent Indian villagers in the last five years and passed them off as Pakistani militants," said Pervez Imroz, a human rights lawyer who spearheads the Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons. "However, since 1989 more than 8,000 Kashmiris have disappeared from the custody of the security forces and we know nothing of their whereabouts."[/FONT]
