Kashmir Rape and Murder Case

The double rape and murder case that has put Kashmir on the edge took a new turn on Thursday when two “witnesses” told a court that they had heard cries for help from inside a security vehicle the day the two women disappeared.

The vehicle, they said, had been parked near a bridge on the Rambiyar stream from where the bodies were recovered the next day.

The two witnesses voluntarily approached the Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up to probe the case and were taken to the court of Chief Judicial Magistrate, Shopian, to record their statement.

The eyewitnesses—Ghulam Mohideen and Abdul Rasheed Pampori—claimed they were on their way home that evening when they saw a security vehicle and heard women’s cries for help.

Mohideen, who runs a shop near the camps of the J-K Police’s Special Operations Group and the CRPF near the bridge, was walking home along with Pampori, a customer. The SIT confirmed that the statement of the two eyewitnesses was recorded before the court today. “Yes, the two witnesses wanted to make a statement and we took them before the magistrate to record what they had to say,” SIT chief SP Shahdeen Malik said.

On May 29, 22-year-old housewife Nilofar and her sister-in-law Aasiya, 17, went missing after they left home to visit the family’s apple orchard 4 km away. A villager told investigators that he had seen the two women leave the orchard for home at 7.30 pm. Nilofar’s husband Shakeel Ahmad Ahangar approached the local police when they did not return home till late night. The bodies were recovered the next day.

Initially, the police and the civil administration had termed it as a “drowning incident” leading to massive protests by villagers. The doctors who conducted the postmortem concluded that the two women were raped and murdered and protests soon spread across the Valley and forced the J&K government to constitute a judicial commission and an SIT.

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