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On Sunday, Indian police accused three people, one of them an army officer, of planting weapons near the bodies of three civilians killed in Kashmir, with the aim of portraying them as insurgents who were caught in an exchange of fire with the army.
On Sunday night, the police said in a statement that the three defendants “placed weapons and materials illegally obtained on the bodies of the three men, after stripping them of their identities and portraying them as extremist terrorists in possession of military equipment.”
As for the army, it announced that the process of recording evidence in this case was not completed until last week, and that other procedures will follow.
After the investigation was opened, the bodies of the three men were exhumed in September and handed over to their relatives after being subjected to DNA analyzes.
In their statement, the police said that Captain Bhubendra Singh is accused of murder, conspiracy and other crimes, and that he is currently under military detention, while his two civilian partners are under their custody.
The statement added that a local court asked the army whether this officer should be tried before a civilian court or subjected to a military trial.
Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, an emergency law that has been in place in Kashmir since 1990 when an armed rebellion broke out against Indian rule, no component of the government forces deployed in this region can be tried before a civil court, unless approved by the New Delhi government.
Over the past three decades, New Delhi has never granted such permission, despite the fact that the police have made dozens of similar requests as a result of investigations into violations they have accused government forces.
The insurgency in Indian Kashmir has killed tens of thousands, most of them civilians.
The killing of these three men last July caused an uproar in the Indian-administered part of this Himalayan region, over which India and Pakistan are fighting.
On that day, the Indian army claimed that the three men were killed in a gun battle in the village of Amchipura in southern Kashmir, and that they had found three machine guns in their possession. The bodies were buried in a hurry in a remote border area.
However, the families of the dead, who live in the remote mountainous district of Rajouri, recognized their sons a month after their killing, through photos spread on social media.
As a result, the families asserted that their children were not rebels, but just laborers who went to Kashmir in search of work in the apple orchards.
This controversy led to the rare occurrence of two separate investigations: the first was undertaken by the army, which has more than 500 thousand soldiers in Kashmir, and the second was taken over by the police, who said that the army did not inform her of the outbreak of armed fighting between its members and rebels until after they were killed, in violation of the rules of engagement followed In such cases.
Source: AFP
