Kashmiri teenager was killed by Indian soldier: BSF
SRINAGAR: India’s border guards said on Wednesday one of their soldiers had shot dead an innocent boy in Indian-administered Kashmir last week, in a rare confession by troops after anti-India protests over the death roiled the disputed region.
A senior paramilitary officer said one of his troopers was involved in the death of 17-year-old Zahid Farooq, who witnesses say was gunned down after a group of boys refused to leave a high-security area.
Doctors said Farooq, who was the second teenager to be killed in a week, had suffered bullet wounds in his chest.
The admission could ease a recent spike in tensions in Indian-administered Kashmir, where hundreds of people have been injured in pitched street battles between government forces and rock-pelting Muslim crowds protesting the killing of the boy.
Those protests were threatening to morph into huge demonstrations against Indian rule in the dispute region, and embarrass New Delhi as it tries to reach out to moderate separatists to end a two-decade-long violent insurgency.
“We have conducted an internal inquiry and prima facie evidence points to a constable,” director general of India’s Border Security Force, P. P. S. Sidhu, told a news conference.
He said the constable was being handed over to the police in Srinagar, the summer capital of the Himalayan region where Muslim insurgents have been fighting New Delhi’s rule for two decades.
Sidhu declined to disclose the circumstances surrounding the death.
But a police spokesman said the trooper was being held on accusations of murder.
“Exemplary punishment will be given to the person so that such crimes are not repeated in the future,” Omar Abdullah, chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir state, later told reporters.
The Himalayan region was already in uproar over the killing of 14-year-old Wamiq Farooq by a police tear-gas shell on January 31, and the latest death has fuelled anger against Indian security forces.
The government has banned the assembly of more than four people in Srinagar but it has been unable to contain the protests in Indian-administered Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan but claimed in full by both.
“Incidents of unprovoked or innocent killings will not be tolerated and whosoever is involved in such killings will be brought to book and doled out exemplary punishment,” Abdullah said last week.
In the past, government forces in Indian-administered Kashmir have been accused of killing civilians during protests and in staged gun battles by passing them off as separatist militants, charges security forces have mostly denied.
Last year a judicial probe into the alleged rape and murder of two women, which also triggered massive protests across Indian-administered Kashmir, pointed to the involvement of police. But so far no police official has been identified or punished for the crime.
Indian troops have rarely accepted their involvement in civilian deaths which have almost always sparked protests.
Authorities did not give the circumstances under which the boy was shot last week. Locals and human rights activists claim he was the sixth civilian killed by police or soldiers in over a month. The charge has not been proved. —Agencies
Hate in the eyes of Kashmiri boy against India and Indian troops.
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