SRINAGAR: Police in the Indian held Kashmir here on Saturday charged a captain of the Indian Army and his two accomplices with killing three local labourers and passing them as militants, foreign media reported.
In a charge sheet filed in a local court, police said the captain had staged a gunfight in South Kashmir on July 18 to make it appear like a clash with militants. A special investigation team of the Jammu and Kashmir Police, which was tasked to probe the fake encounter, filed a 300-page charge sheet against the army officer.
Wajahat Hussain, deputy superintendent of police, who headed the probe committee, was quoted by the local media as saying that the charge sheet had been filed against three persons in the Principal and Sessions Court Shopain area in South Kashmir. He identified the accused as Capitan Bhupinder of 62 Rashtriya Rifles, Tabish Ahmad and Bilal Ahmad, residents of South Kashmir's Shopain and Pulwama districts, respectively.
On Thursday, the army had said that the process of summary of evidence has been completed about the fake encounter in which three labourers of Rajouri district of Jammu region were killed.
The army added that the authorities concerned, along with legal advisers, are examining the case for further proceedings. Earlier, the family had identified the deceased men as Imtiyaz Ahmad, 21, Abrar Ahmad, 25, and Abrar Khatana, 18, from photos that circulated on the social media after the gunfight.
Seventy days later, the bodies of the slain young men were handed to their families after DNA samples matched with their kin. On Sept 18, the army had admitted that three “militants” killed in Shopian were, in fact, civilians from Rajouri.
