Terror in uniform

The Ganderbal killings involving men belonging to the security forces provoke shock and outrage.

PRAVEEN SWAMI in Srinagar

HANDSOME, greying and firm-jawed, selection-grade constable 2786-S Farooq Ahmad Paddar looks disconcertingly like Sean Connery. He is the face of evil, the police file to which his photograph is pinned tells us - but 1960-born Paddar looks like someone who ought to be modelling for expensive cars or single malt.

Known to his friends as `tanker', after the kind of truck he drove for the Jammu and Kashmir Police (JKP), Paddar is thought to hold the clues to a horrific series of cold-blooded murders carried out by counter-terrorism forces in Jammu and Kashmir. Acting on behalf of a group of rogue police and Army officers, Paddar is alleged to have kidnapped residents of the Kokernag area of southern Kashmir. He then, investigators believe, handed them over to the military and police units who murdered the villagers and passed off their bodies as those of unidentified terrorists.

Paddar has said little. In 1990, he was suspended from service on charges of running arms for Islamist terror groups and served two years in jail under Jammu and Kashmir's draconian Public Safety Act. He returned to active service in 1993, after agreeing to inform against his one-time terror comrades - but in that time he had learned how to withstand sustained interrogation. "Sometimes he goes into a rage and starts banging his head into the walls," a source on the special team investigating the murders told Frontline, "and sometimes he cries for hours on end. When he does use words, he deceives and lies. We're still a long way from the full truth. It's disturbing."

Disturbing, though, is not an adequate word to describe even what little is known of the truth.

For the most part, the media have cast the killings as the work of a small group of rogue midlevel police officers acting through subordinates in the ranks. Documents available with Frontline, however, demonstrate that at least three separate Indian Army units in Jammu and Kashmir participated in the murders. Official reports filed by officers of the 5 Rashtriya Rifles, the 13 Rashtriya Rifles and the 24 Rashtriya Rifles made it appear as though the victims were terrorists killed in legitimate counter-insurgency operations.

First Information Report (FIR) 203, filed by the Army on October 5, 2006, records that "multiple ambushes were laid by 13 RR along with SOG [Special Operations Group] Sumbal and JKP at Baazipora [map location] MT 5735". According to the Army, a Karachi-based terrorist code-named Abu Zahid was killed in the operation. An assault rifle and a wireless set were recovered, the Army said.

However, investigators have now determined that the supposed terrorist was in fact Shaukat Khan, a cleric from Banihal in the district of Doda. Like the other victims, Khan was reported missing from Srinagar shortly before his death - in this case, from the Zadibal area near the Hazratbal shrine.

Most of the Army FIRs are not quite so florid in their deception - but are still just as damning. Earlier, on February 17, 2006, the 5 Rashtriya Rifles filed FIR 17 at the Sumbal police station, claiming to have shot dead an unidentified terrorist. According to the Army, it recovered a Kalashnikov rifle, ammunition and a pistol from the body.

Now, however, police investigators and local residents have identified the body as that of Kokernag resident Nasir Ahmad Deka. Little doubt exists that Deka was kidnapped before being killed. A briefcase he used to store the cheap perfumes he hawked on Srinagar kerbsides has been recovered in raids on the home of assistant sub-inspector Farooq Ahmad Guddu, a key member of the rogue police ring, who has been arrested. A bottle of perfume was also discovered on Deka's body after it was exhumed.

Two more murders were carried out in March after Deka's execution. It has now been established that missing Larnoo resident Ali Mohammad Padroo was killed near Kangan on March 8 by the rogue police unit and troops of the 24 Rashtriya Rifles. FIR 25 of 2006, filed at Kangan by the Army unit, claimed that Padroo was an "unidentified terrorist". FIR 52, filed at Sumbal on March 14, 2006, documents that troops of the 24 Rashtriya Rifles murdered Ghulam Nabi Wani, passing off the victim yet again as an unidentified terrorist.

Indians have responded with horror to the news that their Army could have murdered people guilty of nothing - but such incidents, while rare, are far from unknown. For instance, 12 Army personnel, including the 18 Rashtriya Rifles' then-commanding officer Colonel R. Pandey, are facing criminal proceedings for having murdered four labourers at Devsar-Lolab in April 2004 and for having passed them off as terrorists. The murders would have passed undetected had not an anguished member of the unit written a letter to the parents of one of the victims.

Again, in March 2000, Rashtriya Rifles troops allegedly to have executed five civilians and passed them off as members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba hit squad responsible for the earlier massacre of 35 villagers in Chattisinghpora. While the Jammu and Kashmir government and much of the media pinned the blame on the police, Senior Superintendent of Police Farooq Khan was suspended from service for several years, pending investigation - a Central Bureau of Investigation probe later confirmed Frontline's findings that the Army had carried out the killings.

All the Ganderbal victims were desperately poor and therefore voiceless. More likely than not, the Ganderbal killing would have never been uncovered, if it had not been for the extraordinary love of one family, the persistence of a young police officer, and the professional commitment of his superiors.

On December 8, 2006, Larnoo resident Abdul Rahman Paddar, a carpenter by trade, visited Srinagar. He had meant to meet with his long-standing friend and neighbour constable Farooq Ahmed Paddar to discuss the possibility of a job with the Police Department, for which the constable had already received a Rs.75,000 bribe. The carpenter never returned home.

Six days after his disappearance, Abul Rahman Paddar's relatives contacted the office of Uttam Chand, Superintendent of Police, South Zone, Srinagar. At that stage, there was little reason to believe that the carpenter had been the victim of a crime. Nonetheless, Uttam Chand ensured that a missing person report was filed and asked his staff to begin an investigation.

Police investigators began by attempting to trace Abul Rahman Paddar through his mobile phone. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) staff found that while his phone number had become inactive, his cellphone - identified by its IMEI (international mobile equipment identity) number, 357054000874988, was still running, now fitted with a new SIM (subscriber identity module) card. Investigators were able to trace the new phone number, 9419901156, to Abdul Rashid Wagay, a resident of the town of Hajan. On being questioned, Wagay said he had obtained the cellphone from assistant sub-inspector of police Farooq Ahmad Guddu, an officer on counter-terrorism duty in Ganderbal.

Guddu provided the Jammu and Kashmir Police with a full account of Abul Rahman Paddar's killing. He is said to have told investigators that Abdul Rahman Paddar was lured to Srinagar by constable Paddar on December 8. Late that afternoon, a police team led by Guddu allegedly kidnapped the carpenter from the constable's home. He was then driven to Ganderbal in a police vehicle and shot the next day.

Evidence supporting Guddu's extraordinary custodial testimony soon emerged. The police were able to locate witnesses who had seen Abdul Rahman Paddar with constable Paddar on December 8. It also emerged that Guddu had been briefly detained by Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel near the village of Panzath while on his way to Srinagar, after an altercation with civilians - a fact which corroborated his account of how the kidnapping had taken place.

The police now moved rapidly, arresting Ganderbal Senior Superintendent of Police Hans Raj Parihar and Deputy Superintendent of Police Bahadur Ram - the senior-most officers to have ever been held for human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir. For its part, the Army has promised to conduct an in-house investigation into the killings. However, it is unclear whether the Army will make officers available for questioning as the investigation proceeds and whether it will choose to allow the eventual murder trials to be conducted in civilian, rather than military, courts.

According to investigators, the murder conspiracy was most likely conceived in late 2005, as pressure mounted on Parihar to show results - or risk losing his lucrative district posting, which some local newspapers have alleged he used to facilitate timber-smuggling operations along with local legislators. Officers of the SOG went along with the scheme because of the rewards available for each terrorist killed. Parihar roped in Army officers who wanted promotions to execute the actual killings and to provide the weapons that would make the murders appear legitimate. It is unclear whether the Army knew that the men it was killing were innocent - but either way, the killings amounted to cold-blooded murder.

Constable Paddar provided the bodies - all villagers who, like the carpenter, had paid bribes to the constable for favours he did not deliver on and wanted their money back.

For the most part, reportage on disappearances in Jammu and Kashmir has consisted of little other than variations on a standard set of narrative motifs: faded photographs of the victims, the victim's grieving mother or sister, his orphaned child. While emotionally compelling, such accounts tell us little of just how widespread such killings actually are.

In 2003, former Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed moved to fill the fact void. In an effort to draw votes from supporters of the secessionist movement and win the support of the Hizbul Mujahideen, Sayeed promised a full investigation into what he then characterised as large-scale killings of innocent civilians. In March 2003, former Law Minister Muzaffar Beig announced that 3,744 people were missing from Jammu and Kashmir - a figure that was seized on by activists to claim that their allegations of large-scale enforced disappearances had been vindicated.

Beig's figure was, however, only a compilation of the numbers of persons reported to be missing for any reason at all. Later that year, Sayeed declared that just 60 persons had in fact "disappeared" since 1990 - or, put more bluntly, had been established to have been kidnapped and then presumably murdered by security forces. Sayeed's figures came from a list of 743 names provided to the Jammu and Kashmir government by human rights groups, notably the Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). Led by the mother of one of the missing, Parveena Ahanger, and the lawyer Parvez Imroz, the APDP has fought a sustained campaign on the issue.

Investigators focussed their attention on the 84 disappearances human rights activists said had taken place between November 2002, when Sayeed took power, and August 2003. Of these, the Jammu and Kashmir Police discovered that only the names and addresses of 58 tallied with actual individuals.

For instance, the lists put out by human rights activists contained the name of Mohammad Altaf Yatoo of Aripathan village in Beerwah. It turned out, though, that no one of that name had ever lived in the village. Twenty-six of the "missing", the police said, were traced to their homes. Another "disappeared" individual turned out to be in the Srinagar central jail. Six others, the police said, had turned terrorists, while jehadi groups had kidnapped two.

Given that organisations such as the APDP had long been claiming that between 8,000 and 10,000 individuals had been victims of enforced disappearances, the inability to put out a credible list of even a few hundred names was a serious failure. One key problem, journalist Masood Husain reported in The Economic Times in September 2003, was Imroz's data-management procedures: "Lacking an organised data bank, another of his colleagues said they go on making the missing list on the basis of the complaints they receive but there are no deletions."

Moreover, much of the literature on the subject did not comprehend the distinction between missing persons and those subjected to human rights violations. Did They Vanish Into Thin Air?, a book by journalist Zahir-ud-Din, suffers from its failure to draw a distinction between innocent civilians kidnapped and killed by security forces and terrorists who crossed into Pakistan - individuals for whom neither the Jammu and Kashmir government nor the Indian Army can reasonably be expected to account for.

For instance, several independent media accounts have said that there are thousands of young men from Jammu and Kashmir living in jehadi training facilities or refugee centres in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Others may have been killed while crossing the Line of Control.

Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has now put the figure of the missing at 1,017, after removing the names of those who are known to be terrorists or who are living in Pakistan. Dozens of families from across Jammu and Kashmir have moved the police with complaints in the wake of the Ganderbal findings.

Many of the complaints reported in the media relate to individuals the police or the Army admit to having killed - but in legitimate encounters. Others relate to terrorists killed in suspicious circumstances, rather than innocents picked up and murdered for no reason. Often, the evidence is ambiguous or too weak to withstand legal scrutiny.

Ever since news of the Ganderbal murders broke, television viewers have been seeing images of angry crowds demanding justice. One feature has been striking: there have been few slogans directly attacking the Jammu and Kashmir or the Central government. Indeed, during a February 6 strike against the Ganderbal killings, many protesters in Srinagar even carried banners making it clear they were not affiliated with any political group - a message directed at the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC). Nor has the Chief Minister succumbed to the temptation of directing generalised insults at the security forces. As he pointed out in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, all that the police would have had to do was throw away Abul Rahman Paddar's phone, and the sole piece of evidence that then linked them to the carpenter's murder would have been gone.

Azad has achieved what seemed impossible - ensuring that the rule of law is respected, as best as possible, even in the middle of what is in fact an extraordinarily ugly proxy war. Still, the Ganderbal investigation has made one thing clear: a full-scale, transparent investigation into each allegation is imperative. Even if Sayeed were right and there had been just 60 murders by uniformed persons since 1989, that is still five dozen too many. Each one will have to be accounted for - and the perpetrators punished.