SRINAGAR, India, 21 December 2002 — Separatists gunned down a ruling party legislator as he was leaving a mosque in Indian-administered Kashmir yesterday. The attack on Abdul Aziz Mir, who won a state assembly seat in the September October elections on the ticket of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), took place in his constituency of Pampore on the outskirts of the summer capital Srinagar.
Aziz, 43, was leaving the mosque after Friday prayers when gunmen emerged from the crowd and opened fire on him, a police officer said. “Owing to the presence of the crowd, Mir’s bodyguards could not retaliate,” the officer told AFP.
Mir was transferred to Srinagar’s main hospital where he later died of blood loss, according to a doctor. The area where the attack took place was sealed and a hunt launched for the killers.
A lesser-known group, the Save Kashmir Movement, claimed responsibility for the killing, the local Current News Service said. A spokesman for the group, Sheikh Tajamul, told the agency that those “safeguarding the interests of India in Kashmir will meet the same fate.”
Kashmir is being ruled by a coalition comprising the PDP and India’s main opposition Congress party. India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other Hindu groups have accused the PDP of being “soft on terrorism” for its decision to release from prison some two dozen separatists.
Meanwhile, militants killed three young women in their homes just days after posters appeared in the state ordering women to wear a veil. Two of the women, both 21, were shot dead in their homes in Rajouri district in the south of the state on Thursday night. The third woman, 22, was taken away and beheaded, an official said.
“There is a possibility these killings are linked with the militants’ directive on a dress code. We have sent a police party,” he said. Posters signed by a little-known group, Lashkar Jabbar, appeared in Rajouri town and neighboring villages asking women not to step out of their homes without a veil, the official said.
More than a dozen groups are fighting Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir, which is at the heart of more than 50 years of hostility with Pakistan. A few groups in the past have ordered women in the Kashmir Valley to wear a veil, but the order was largely ignored.
The Lashkar Jabbar sprayed acid on two women in Srinagar last year for defying its dress code. The group then threatened to shoot Muslim women if they failed to wear veils. (Agencies)
