SRINAGAR: Protesters have clashed with police across Indian Kashmir’s main city as residents continued to insist Indian soldiers raped and killed two young women whose bodies were found in a stream last week.
Troops wearing riot gear and carrying assault rifles flooded the streets in Srinagar, the main city in the disputed Himalayan region. Police and paramilitary soldiers fired tear gas and swung batons to break up the protests, a police officer said on condition of anonymity in keeping with department policy.
Massive protests followed Friday prayers across the Valley which remained shut for the fifth consecutive day as police detained the pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) Chairman, Mohammad Yasin Malik yesterday.
Protests erupted immediately after the Friday prayers in most parts of the summer capital and other towns including the southern Shopian town and its suburbs which left more than 100 persons wounded.
Reports from Shopian where two local women were allegedly raped and murdered by the security forces last Friday indicated that thousands of villagers from adjoining villages started swarming the main town, but were intercepted en route by the security forces triggering clashes between the protesters and security forces.
The hard-line separatist leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani who had called for the protest shutdown against the incident yesterday extended his strike call by another two days.
Geelani, who is under house arrest, was not allowed by the authorities to hold a scheduled press conference at his uptown Hyderpora residence yesterday afternoon.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has reiterated his government’s commitment to “dig out the truth”. “I won’t permit anybody to suppress the truth under any circumstances and if any official is found wanting, exemplary punishment would be given to him. I feel the pain which will only be removed once we find out the truth,” Abdullah said.
Meanwhile, opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) President Mehbooba Mufti has urged the state government to take “the first essential step of registering an FIR on the rape-cum-murder case of Shopian girls if it was serious in finding out truth.”
“Unless police registers the case and takes up investigation seriously no amount of assurances would work,” she said in a statement. Mehbooba reiterated that the “credibility of the judicial probe had been eroded as a result of frequently shifting stand of the government on the nature of crime and it would serve no purpose to continue the exercise.”
