A Kashmiri Journalist reports to Tehelka on the murders. Should put to rest any doubt on wether militants were behind their murder.
Sopore sisters fall to militant bullets. But the angry Valley looks the other way
Tehelka - India's Independent Weekly News Magazine
IN A congested neighbourhood of old decaying houses, mourners arrive quietly through narrow muddy lanes. On the evening of 31 January, suspected militants dragged two teenaged sisters out of their home in Sopore, Jammu & Kashmir, and shot them dead in cold blood. This time, there were no cries of revenge from angry boys on the streets nor demands for investigations. In the silences and whispers, it seems as if something ominous rather than horrendous has happened.
In Muslim Peer, where most of the residents are related to each other, the pauses and measured answers of the girls relatives are surprising. There is a palpable feeling of fear and also of an overnight alienation. The victims family suddenly feels out of place after rumours that the girls were not only immoral but also informers for the security forces.
Why else would militants kill them? Of course, they had a questionable character too for which they had been warned before, is a common refrain in the town located 35 km northwest of Srinagar.
Akhtara, 18, and Arifa, 16, were beautiful and poor and often it is a tragic mix, more so when they refused to conform to the accepted morality of Sopore, a Jamaat-e- Islami and militant stronghold.
According to locals, the sisters used to roam around the market at dusk, laughing and chatting on their cell phones. Akhtara was warned in April and asked to mend her ways but she continued to behave improperly, says a shopkeeper.
At around 7.45 pm on that fateful day, Arifa was cooking rice in the kitchen of her 8x10 ft single-room home. Akhtara was upstairs at her uncles place cleaning fish. Their father Ghulam Nabi Dar, a manual labourer in a ration depot, had gone to the mosque. Their mother Fareeza, a housewife who can no longer walk because of arthritis, was sitting with her 15-year-old son Ghulam Jeelani when the door suddenly opened and three masked men clad in phirans walked in.
One of them asked my daughter to come out. I knew something was amiss but I had no idea it would go this wrong, says Fareeza. We all fell at their feet, begging them to tell us if we had done something wrong. But they said they just wanted to ask a few questions.
Outside, it was like a crackdown, says a neighbour. Almost everyone heard the noises but no one came out. There were 6-7 armed men who had cordoned off the area. When we tried to open a window, they warned us to stay inside. We were too afraid to go out, says a relative.
The gunmen locked Fareeza inside and went up to get Akhtara. Her uncle tried hard to stop them but they hit him and took the girls away. Some of us followed them but they sent us back saying they just want to talk to them alone. They said it was better for us to go home and not make them angry, and we returned, recalls Shareefa, their aunt, whom Akhtara used to help with the fish.
Jeelani, who is frail and looks younger than his 15 years, hovered around, unable to understand what to do. Sometimes, he hugged his sisters and sometimes begged the gunmen to leave them alone, but his pleas fell on deaf ears
Fifteen minutes later, gunshots shattered whatever little hopes the family had left. The bodies were found in Rahim Sahib neighbourhood. One was riddled with six holes, the other with four, including one through the head.
One of the sisters had a broken arm and another had broken teeth. Their back had been lashed and I couldnt count the injuries, says a relative who gave the sisters their final bath before burial. Not many people attended the funeral, as it was almost certain that it was militants who had killed the immoral girls.
THE POLICE had given out the names of two local Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) militants Muzaffar Naikoo alias Muz Maulvi and Waseem Ganai within hours of the killings but the United Jehad Council (UJC) refuted the police claim and vowed to conduct its own investigation.
Everyone in Sopore seemed to have known the sisters or maybe their murder increased their notoriety. They used to go out to the market at dusk, talk on cell phones on the street and also roamed around STF (Special Task Force) camps, was the common refrain. But no one saw them entering an STF camp and the police say that none of their informers dare enter the camp through the bus yard.
Theres nothing to prove that the girls were informers. They havent stashed any riches, certainly not in their home. They dont have a television or a bathroom.
Akhtara cleaned fish for Rs.4 a kg and used to work about four hours a day. Even when she was dragged out, she had fish scales and stench on her hands, recalls Shareefa.
Ritual condemnations came from several sides but no real words of anger or outrage were said. After the UJC denied any role in the killing, Hurriyat (G) gave a protest call insinuating that it was the work of State agencies. A day later, LeT posters appeared all over the town claiming responsibility for the killing. We killed the two girls because their behaviour was improper and they were involved in degraded activities like informing the security agencies, the poster read. It also threatened to take action against those who had started raising questions about the murders. No proofs and explanations of the girls involvement as informers were provided.
As for the mainstream political parties, the Peoples Democratic Party, which acts as human right champions in the Valley, didnt talk about the issue for days. The PDP made a passing reference about it five days later in its angry statement over the killing of Manzoor Ahmad Magray, 21, by the army in Handwara on 5 February.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah visited Magrays family a day after his killing, but bypassed a numbed mother, a distraught father and hurt brother. However, he was the first to tweet about the murders but no one from Dars house was following him on Twitter.
Meanwhile, human rights group Coalition of Civil Society, which sent its volunteers to the family, said that the real task was to work beyond statements and make these acts intolerable in our society.
If the militants have killed the girls for promiscuity, then we have a huge task ahead of us because it is not the job of militants to decide who is promiscuous among us and give punishments. This is against international human rights principles and is certainly against Islam, says Khurram Parvez, a human rights activist. And if the girls were informers, we strongly condemn it because we dont accept civilian killings and we had got UJC to agree to it, he says.
Dar is a broken man and it is hard to imagine him carrying a load on his bent back as he has been doing for the past 15 years. Fareeza hasnt moved from a relatives home where she wails and sings elegies to her dead daughters. Jeelani roams around the bylanes like a ghost.
Their 8x10 ft room with wires hanging from its low ceiling and the rough cement walls turned black suddenly seems to have become big for the family that was always cramped for space.
In a distant corner, Fareeza wails in her elegy. We were two daughters and a mother, we used to joke and laugh together. Tomorrow when everyone will go, who will I talk to? Without her crutches how will a cripple live, come back my daughter, come back to me!
