Impunity in India | By Shubh Mathur

Major Avtar Singh of the Indian Army’s counterinsurgency in Kashmir killed dozens. India refused to punish him. So did Canada and the U.S., where he killed his family and committed suicide.

Jaleel Andrabi Kashmiri human rights lawyer who was brutally killed by Major Avtar Singh 

                            

On Saturday June 9, 2012, Major Avtar Singh, formerly of the Indian Army and living in Selma, California, shot his wife and three children. Before turning the gun on himself, he called the Sheriff’s office and told them that he had killed four people. The SWAT team that responded to the call found his youngest and oldest sons, ages three and seventeen, and his wife, dead of gunshot wounds to the head; the middle son, fifteen years old, was critically injured, but alive. He died a few days later, from wounds to the head.

The execution-style gunshots to the head were identical to those which killed Major Singh’s most famous victim, the Kashmiri human rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi. Andrabi was abducted, tortured and murdered in 1996 for exposing abuses carried out by the Indian Army in Kashmir. Major Avtar Singh was also wanted by Kashmir’s courts and Interpol for the murder of twenty-eight people in Kashmir in the course of his career as an officer in 35 Rashtriya Rifles, a counterinsurgency unit of the Indian Army. The story of his crimes and the manner in which he evaded justice for sixteen years is a grim chronicle of Indian crimes against humanity in Kashmir and of the silence of the international community which has abetted these. The impunity exploited by India and enabled by the international community clearly corrupted Singh’s conscience, to judge by the murder of his family and his subsequent suicide. Until it deals with the gross human rights violations in Kashmir and an impunity that harkens back to its colonial past, India’s proud claims as the world’s most populous democracy are fatally tainted.

The Death of a Lawyer

Jalil Andrabi was a Kashmiri human rights lawyer who dared to challenge the army in the early 1990s as Indian forces fought a pro-independence insurgency. Indian counterinsurgency in Kashmir unfolded as a classic dirty war, where the army regarded the civilian population as the enemy. Widespread abuses by the armed forces—extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, disappearances, firing on unarmed protestors, arson, looting, destruction of houses and crops—were intended to break down popular support for independence. Andrabi founded the Kashmir Commission of Jurists to uphold basic human rights through legal action, and filed thousands of habeas corpus petitions on behalf of detained Kashmiris. Representing prisoners in court, Andrabi won rulings to prevent the army from carrying out torture and extrajudicial executions, or from transferring Kashmiri prisoners to jails outside the state where they would be cut off from family and legal support. He was also outspokenly committed to Kashmiri independence. Before organizations like Human Rights Watch, the International Commission of Jurists, and Amnesty International, he meticulously detailed a saga of official abuse, and was, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “a frequent caller at diplomatic missions in New Delhi, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and the U.S. State Department.” In 1995, he traveled to Geneva to address the UN Human Rights Commission; he was due to do so again in 1996. In a speech in Delhi a few weeks before his murder in February that year, he describes the situation in Kashmir: “The enormity and the level of atrocities being committed on the people of Kashmir for the last more than six years [sic]” he said, “has been such that it amounts to the abuse of sovereignty… According to some estimates more than 40,000 people have been killed, which include all—old, men and children, women, sick and infirm. The youth of Kashmir have been mowed down. They are tortured in torture cells and… thousands of youth have been killed in police custody. These atrocities being committed on the people of Kashmir are not mere aberrations. These are part of deliberate and systematic state policy… aimed to silence the people of Kashmir into subjugation.”

Andrabi went on to describe the absolute powers given to the Indian military by laws like the Armed Forces (J&K) Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and J&K Disturbed Areas Act. Based directly on colonial legislation used by the British to suppress the Indian movement for independence, these laws gave the armed forces a summary power to shoot to kill—with impunity from prosecution—those accused of human rights violations. The AFSPA, copied from the Armed Forces Special Powers Ordinance of 1942, was adopted by the Indian parliament in 1958. It was promulgated first in Nagaland in the northeast. Like Kashmir, Nagaland was inhabited by ethnic and religious minorities campaigning for independence after the British left the subcontinent. Again like Kashmir, the Indian response to Naga lobbying for self-determination was itself copied directly from colonial models of British counterinsurgency in Malaya, Burma, and Palestine.

[Andrabi] ended with a quote from Human Rights Watch that would make the impunity starkly clear: “The government of India has never made public any action it has taken to investigate these killings and prosecute those responsible.”

In a picture his brother Arshad had blown up for showing to the media, Andrabi has thick eyebrows that arch above sympathetic, slightly mournful eyes. His gaze reads as stubborn, unflagging. Dressed in a gray suit with wide lapels and a slate gray v-neck sweater, he wears a beard that is tightly shaved along with hair moderately trimmed. Anything but effusive, he stares directly at the camera, his mouth almost taciturn, his brow tentative, furrowed. Given the community he worked within, Andrabi witnessed his own friends and colleagues—lawyers and journalists committed to ending the abuses—under constant attack. Arundhati Roy has called Kashmir “the most highly militarized zone in the world.” In April 1995, two unidentified gunmen opened fire on Mian Abdul Qayoom, President of the J&K Bar Association, leaving him seriously injured. In October, High Court Advocate A.Q. Sailani was killed by “unidentified gunmen” a few yards from an army bunker in Srinagar. In his own final public speech, Andrabi memorialized them and others, invoking their names, the dates they were taken. Describing in detail the shots fired, the extrajudicial killings, the disappearances, often the last breaths of these friends, which family members saw them and where, he ended with a quote from Human Rights Watch that would make the impunity starkly clear: “The government of India has never made public any action it has taken to investigate these killings and prosecute those responsible.”

The killing of Jalil Andrabi was staged as a public spectacle. For three days, the neighborhood of Peer Bagh was surrounded by military vehicles and cordoned off; anyone entering or leaving was stopped and questioned. Andrabi’s brothers, who resemble him closely, were stopped this way. On March 8, 1996, the car in which Andrabi and his wife, Rifat, were traveling was waved to stop, and he was taken by soldiers. Rifat pleaded with the head officer to release her husband, but he refused. She could not drive, so, as the convoy sped off, she found an auto-rickshaw (a makeshift motor scooter with passenger seats and an awning, the staple of public transport in the subcontinent) to follow them. The trucks were much faster than the auto; she could not keep up with the convoy.

The same evening Rifat attempted to file a First Incident Report (FIR) naming the army personnel responsible for the abduction at the local police station in Sadar, but she was refused. An Amnesty International report records interference from the police, army, and central government to keep the army from being mentioned in connection with the abduction: “The Inspector General of Police reportedly reassured Rifat Andrabi on the phone later at night that Andrabi was ‘with them’ and would be released after the completion of investigations. On the following morning, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association, of which Andrabi was a member, filed a habeas corpus petition in the High Court, which then directed all the law enforcement agencies in the state to declare whether they were holding Andrabi. In a sworn affidavit presented on 11 March, the army stated before the High Court that ‘Rashtriya Rifles do not operate in the said area, neither was any member deputed/present at Parayapora at 5:30 p.m. nor did any member of Rashtriya Rifles apprehend or receive the alleged detinue on the date and time given.’” The Amnesty report indicates that police “urged the family to alter their FIR so as not to mention suspected army involvement but to declare instead that Andrabi had been taken away by unknown persons.” Rifat and her family reluctantly agreed as they were apparently told that if they did so, they could meet Andrabi. “On 13 March,” the report continues, “the FIR was finally registered but the family was not informed of Andrabi’s whereabouts.” As the report makes clear, the High Court was unable to enforce the habeas petition to compel the army and police to produce Andrabi in court. The writ of habeas corpus has been the foundation for the protection of individual liberty and rights from arbitrary state action; effectively, it does not apply in Kashmir. Ten years after the murder of Andrabi, Human Rights Watch cites Kashmiri human rights activists who estimate that there are 60,000 pending habeas petitions in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Given the deep mythic significance of India’s rivers in the Hindu tradition, this defilement is especially telling. ‘The largest democracy in the world’ has polluted its sacred waters with the bodies of its tortured citizens,” said Mahmood.

Weeks later, on March 27th, Andrabi’s body was found in the mud on the banks of the Jhelum, the river that runs through Srinagar. The post-mortem report records evidence of torture: wounds to the head and body, facial bones broken, eyes torn out, skin all over the body loose and peeling, gunshot wounds to the head which finally caused death. Dumping bodies into rivers is a favored method used by the armed forces to dispose of those who die under torture. Srinagar residents who live near the Jhelum are accustomed to finding bodies and body parts in the river and on its banks. Cynthia Mahmood, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame has witnessed and experienced the practice of state terror and the violent silencing of dissent. Mahmood is not Indian, but was attacked and gang-raped in India for writing about abuses against the Sikhs in the 1980s, in the course of counterinsurgency operations. She recounts: “In Muzaffarabad, on the Pakistani or ‘free’ side of Kashmir, a blackboard by the banks of the Jhelum River keeps count as Kashmiri bodies float down from across the borders. (When I visited in January 1997, the grim chalk tally then was at 476). Given the deep mythic significance of India’s rivers in the Hindu tradition, this defilement is especially telling. ‘The largest democracy in the world’ has polluted its sacred waters with the bodies of its tortured citizens.”

Andrabi was one of the leading citizens of Srinagar, and his killing was meant as a warning that no one was safe from the army. Protests in Kashmir against the killing, led by Andrabi’s colleagues at the Srinagar High Court Bar Association, and international outrage resulted in an investigation. The High Court ordered the creation of a police Special Investigation Team (SIT). The team’s report identified Major Singh of the 35 Rashtriya Rifles as perpetrator. The Court’s proceedings over the next eleven years record its futile attempts to force the police or the army to produce Major Singh in court to stand trial for Andrabi’s and twenty-eight others’ murders while he was posted in Kashmir in the early- to mid-1990s. The Court went so far as to hold the members of the SIT in contempt for failing to bring Singh to trial, thereby flouting the law and fostering impunity. The army’s response to repeated requests from the High Court was to claim that it was unaware of his whereabouts, that he had acted in an individual capacity, or that he was “absconding.”

While the army, which continued to pay his pension, claimed that it was unable to find Major Singh, a reporter for The Indian Express was able to track him down in Ludhiana in 1998 and interview him. In the interview, which has been discussed but never publicly published, Singh claimed he was being made a scapegoat by the government. In 2004, the army informed the Court that it intended to court-martial Singh, rather than produce him in court to answer the charges against him. The court-martial never happened. The High Court had ordered the government and police in 1997 to impound Singh’s passport and watch all airports, ports, and railway stations to prevent him from leaving the country. In 2006, however, he was discovered to have fled to Canada, seeking asylum there on the grounds that the Indian government was trying to frame him for the murder. The Canadian government asked Interpol for information regarding the murder charges against him, and this request was relayed by way of local police to the court at Budgam.

Groups like the Canadian Center for International Justice and Amnesty International tried to persuade the Canadian government to fulfill its legal obligations as a member of the International Criminal Court to try Singh for crimes against humanity. Despite a thorough investigation in 2007 by the War Crimes Unit of the Canadian Department of Justice, no prosecution was initiated. Singh’s asylum application was denied, and that was deemed by Canadian officials to be sufficient punishment, as it ensured that he would not be able to apply for immigration status in any other country where he might choose to settle. It was doubtless with a sense of relief that the Canadian government found that some time in 2006-7, Singh had illegally entered the United States.

The Nightingale

But Singh’s presence in Canada would spur two important events. First, the legal documents from the case were scrutinized by international human rights lawyers, who became familiar with his modus operandi—that is, of using pro-government militants to carry out a campaign of kidnapping, extortion, torture, and murder. These militants, known as renegades, were recruited from among surrendered militants, trained, armed, paid, and protected by the army. They operated alongside special counterinsurgency forces like the Rashtriya Rifles to terrorize the civilian population and silence critics. According to the statements gathered by the SIT, the manner and reasons for the killing were varied; some of the victims were abducted and tortured to death, others were hanged by Major Singh himself, their bodies left lying along the National Highway with the intention of blaming the crime on armed, pro-independence militants. The reasons for the killings were also varied—extortion, personal animosities, settling family scores, random terror. With his signature ruthlessness, Singh perfected a strategy of disposing of evidence and effectively silencing witnesses, by killing in turn the renegades who had carried out the murders he ordered. One of the statements recorded by the SIT recounts a conversation between Major Singh and a renegade who managed to survive this killing spree: “At my insistance [T] (name withheld) had asked Major Avtar Singh why he killed Sikandar, [who] was working with [the] army. Major Avtar Singh replied that Sikandar and his associates know our secrets. Therefore we cannot trust them. In case he [is] caught by police, he will tell everything about us and will expose the army. Therefore it was better to kill them.” This deadly domino effect brought the known number of Major Singh’s victims to at least twenty-eight. Journalists who knew of him at the time described him as “a tyrant” and “drunk with power.” His colleagues nicknamed him Bulbul, “The Nightingale.”

Journalist Umar Sultan traced Avtar Singh’s other crimes: “Residents of the neighborhood of Batamaloo in downtown Srinagar remember Major Singh taking away scores of youths who were killed in various ways: ‘Our hands were tied from behind. The Major ordered his troops to throw the boy into the Jhelum and they did,’ says Junaid, one of Singh’s would-be victims. ‘I closed my eyes and started praying thinking I would be the next but I was brought back. I feared that nobody would know about my fate.’ Junaid recalls the time when he was held in a Palhalan camp in 1997, and Singh brought a local teacher over. ‘The Major tore his undershirt, bundled it and shoved it in the teacher’s throat with his cane,’ Junaid says. ‘The teacher died in front of my eyes.’ Junaid was later transferred to the Shariefabad army camp, on the outskirts of Srinagar. Major Singh would show up there too, this time bringing Junaid’s neighbors, Mohammad Shaban and his son Yahya Khan of Batamaloo, to the camp.”

“‘Yahya was already dead when he was brought to the camp, his father was tortured to death subsequently,’ recalls Junaid, who was released from Shariefabad two and a half months later. His memory of what he came across inside the garrison is chilling. ‘The Major was notorious for burning people alive in an iron tank inside the Shariefabad camp,’ he says.”

A second consequence of Singh’s presence in Canada was a showdown with India that Canada would lose. Starting some time in late 2007 or early 2008, Canadian immigration authorities began denying visas to Indian military and paramilitary personnel who had been involved in counterinsurgency operations in Kashmir. When this news hit the Indian media in 2010, the Indian government’s response was bullish, demanding that the Canadian government respect Indian sensitivities on Kashmir. In the run-up to the Indian prime minister’s visit to Canada for the G20 summit in May 2010, the Indian government issued a clear ultimatum: Canada could not afford to offend India, in the middle of a global recession. The Canadian Immigration Minister apologized profusely, called the policy a mistake, and promised that it would be discontinued. On immigration blogs, it was predicted that heads would roll; and so, with no discussion of the abuses that led to the visa denials, the first and only international effort to hold Indian military personnel accountable for human rights violations ended ignominiously. Victory for the violators.

Singh had absolute confidence that he would be protected. He even called the local police to complain about harassment when he heard rumors that a Kashmiri journalist had tracked him to his home in Fresno County.

In February 2011, Major Singh again made local headlines in a small town in Fresno County, California. His wife called the police in a domestic violence case, to report that he had tried to choke her. When he was taken into custody, the police found out that he was wanted for murder in Kashmir and that there was an Interpol Red Notice for his arrest. Though living illegally in the US, he owned a thriving trucking business. The Selma Police Chief called the State Department to ask if they should hold Major Singh so that he could be handed over to Interpol, but was told to let him go. His wife did not press charges, and for another year he lived in relative anonymity.

In Kashmir, meanwhile, Jalil Andrabi’s family and the High Court in Budgam continued to pressure the Indian government to extradite Singh to stand trial in India. It was clear to observers following the case that this was in fact the last thing the Indian government wanted; it was also clear to Singh himself, who gave a chillingly candid interview to an Indian journalist in June 2011.

He claimed that he knew who exactly was responsible for the murders, and that the Indian government did not want him in the dock: “There is no question of my being taken to India alive, they will kill me… The agencies, RAW, military intelligence, it is all the same… If the extradition does go through, I will open my mouth, I will not keep quiet.”

“These lives could have been saved if a trial of Major Avtar Singh was conducted on time,” said Andrabi’s brother Arshad. “We have lost that chance now. He was a known murderer and we are appalled that he was even shielded in the United States.”

In this standoff with the Indian government, Singh had absolute confidence that he would be protected. He even called the local police to complain about harassment when he heard rumors that a Kashmiri journalist had tracked him to his home in Fresno County and wanted to interview him. Despite an Interpol notice that he was wanted for murder, he was sure that the local police force would not touch him. In the end, it was not the law, but, apparently, his own haunted conscience that forced a final accounting for his crimes.

The killings in California, if not those in Kashmir, finally forced US media to take notice of the crimes committed by Major Singh. The New York Times, which for the past year had alternated stories of discovery of mass graves in Indian-administered Kashmir with accounts of booming tourism, finally managed to connect the two, conceding that peace can only be based on justice for past killings.

Back in Kashmir, the news of Major Singh’s latest murders and suicide received a subdued response. As Andrabi’s brother Arshad said, Singh’s family’s deaths were due to the Indian government’s refusal to initiate extradition proceedings. “These lives could have been saved if a trial of Major Avtar Singh was conducted on time,” he said. “We have lost that chance now. He was a known murderer and we are appalled that he was even shielded in the United States. It’s a failure of justice at all levels.”

Kashmiris are aware that Major Singh did not act alone. The abuses, torture and killings tellingly continue. As the nature of the revolt against Indian rule changes, returning to its roots as a popular uprising, so do chosen victims of the repression; now they are more likely to be teenagers, boys and young men who grew up knowing only military occupation, who came out into the streets to challenge Indian abuses in the summer of 2010. In the course of this popular uprising, which foreshadowed the Arab Spring, Indian forces killed 122 unarmed protesters, most of them teenagers, the youngest under 10 years old. Since then thousands have been arrested and tortured, many of them young children. They are charged under the Public Safety Act with “waging war against the nation.” Pictures posted on Facebook show these children being beaten and arrested by police and paramilitaries, brought to court and for school examinations in handcuffs and chains. Kashmiris posting on Facebook about the continuing abuses are under constant threat from the army and police.

Matt Eisenbrandt of the Canadian Centre for International Justice is a human rights lawyer who has been among the pioneers in applying the principles of Universal Jurisdiction to bring human rights abusers to justice, no matter where they try to seek shelter: “The Avtar Singh case demonstrates perfectly why we need Universal Jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and extrajudicial killings in any court around the world and why governments need to exercise that authority. Clearly, the government of India had no interest in bringing Singh to justice for the murder of Jalil Andrabi. But Singh’s presence in Canada and the United States provided opportunities for him to be held accountable in those countries.”

To Eisenbrandt, the failure is clearly systemic and sprawls across borders. “The U.S. government,” he says, “after initially locating and detaining Singh and ordering him deported, took no further steps. Despite being fully aware of Singh’s alleged role in Mr. Andrabi’s murder, the United States took no action. Even after Singh was arrested for domestic violence, nothing was done. At each step along the way, governments had the power to hold Singh accountable but they never did.”

As Jalil Andrabi knew sixteen years ago, these abuses are no aberration. This long chronicle of violence indicates that Indian rule in Kashmir rests on military force and, according to many, has no political legitimacy. The historical and legal grounds for India’s claim to Kashmir are contested by the likes of authors Pankaj Mishra, Arundhati Roy, and Pakistani-British historian Tariq Ali, among many others. In the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson writes that India’s claims to Kashmir are based on “a document, now recently ‘discovered,’ on which the Indian state bases its entire claim to Kashmir, but was unable to produce for over half a century… Still, it remained all too obvious that a province with an overwhelming Muslim majority had been acquired by force and—as would in due course become clear—fraud.” The United Nations recognizes Kashmir as a disputed territory, and maintains military observers on both sides of the Line of Control dividing Indian-held Kashmir from the Pakistani side. In April 2012, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Christof Heyns, visited Srinagar and met the family of Andrabi; as well as those of five young men who were kidnapped by the army and murdered at Pathribal, then passed off as militants accused of a massacre; he met too with Shakeel Ahangar, whose wife and sister were both raped and murdered, their bodies found in shallow water near one of the army camps surrounding Shopian, and Masooda Parveen, whose husband Ghulam Mohi-ud-din Regoo was detained, tortured and killed by the army in 1998. Heyns’s visit was hosted by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), a remarkable group which under the leadership of Parveena Ahangar, one of the mothers of the disappeared, has led the way in seeking justice and accountability for human rights abuses in Kashmir.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Heyns’s report called upon the Indian government to “take measures to fight impunity in cases of extrajudicial executions, and communal and traditional killings.” Given how far the Indian government has gone to protect criminals like Singh, these words rang empty to many. Kashmiris and a small but growing global constituency concerned with the resolution of the conflict are also aware that the Indian government, which provides legal impunity to its military personnel, cannot be trusted to investigate and prosecute their crimes. In fact, the Indian Supreme Court twice dismissed legal challenges to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act—in 1997 and 2007—arguing that it is an essential element of Indian government in border regions. In light of this, I would argue that it is time for an International Criminal Tribunal on Kashmir, to record and account for twenty-three years of crimes against humanity. It is from this record that a real political solution can emerge.

Shubh Mathur is an Indian anthropologist whose interests include human rights, nations and borders, the death penalty, minorities, immigration and Muslim communities in the United States, gender, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean world. She has conducted fieldwork in India, New York City, and Kashmir. Her first book, The Everyday Life of Hindu Nationalism, was published by the Three Essays Collective press. She is currently working on a collaborative ethnography with the families of the disappeared in Kashmir.

Previously Published At Guernicamag

Previously Published At guernicamag.comhttp://www.guernicamag.com/features/impunity-in-india/

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The Mass Graves Of Kashmir

For 22 years this contested region has endured a regime of torture and disappeared civilians. Now a local lawyer is discovering their unmarked graves and challenging India's abuses

One sodden evening in April 2010, an Indian army major from the 4 Rajputana Rifles arrived at a remote police post where the mountains gather in a half-hitch around Kashmir, India's northernmost state. Major Opinder Singh "seemed in a hurry", a duty policeman recalled. Up in the heights of the Pir Panjal range, down through which the major had descended, it was snowing and his boots let in water. "The officer reported that the previous night his men had killed three Pakistani terrorists who had crossed over into our Machil sector," the policeman recalled. "Where are the bodies?" the policeman had asked, filling in a First Information Report that started a criminal enquiry. "They were buried where they were shot," the major retorted, before taking off in his jeep.

"It was not unusual," the policeman later told investigators, when questioned as to why he had not insisted on viewing the corpses or checking the identities. Kashmir had been in turmoil since Partition in 1947 and on a virtual war footing for the past two decades, with some estimates placing the dead at 70,000. Strung with razor wire and anti-missile netting, the state had been transformed into one of the most militarised places on earth, with one Indian paramilitary or soldier stationed for every 17 residents. The Pakistani intelligence services and military trained and funded a legion of irregulars, who infiltrated over the mountains to kick-start a full-blown insurgency in 1989, keeping the Indian-ruled portion of the Muslim-majority state permanently alight.

Once picture-perfect, a place of pilgrimage for backpackers and mystics of all religions, Kashmir had become one of the most beautiful and dangerous frontlines in the world. Machil, the sector in which Singh had sprung his operation, was especially treacherous, consisting of a clutch of isolated villages strung along the Line of Control (LoC), a high-altitude ceasefire line that had split Kashmir in 1972. Up here in the thin air, India had created a fearsome barrier, made lethal with the help of Israeli technology, a partially electrified series of fences connected to motion detectors, surrounded by a heavily mined no-man's land.

On 30 April, 2010, an armed forces spokesman in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, confirmed Singh's story. "Three militants have been killed in a shootout," said Lieutenant Colonel JS Brar, detailing how three AK-47s, one Pakistani pistol, ammunition, cigarettes, chocolates, dates, two water bottles, a Kenwood radio and 1,000 Pakistani rupees had been recovered. The standard-issue infiltration kit. The corpseless triple-death inquiry was an open and shut case.

However, a few days later, at Panzalla police station, 30 miles from Machil, a simple missing case was causing everyone problems. Three Kashmiri families from nearby Nadihal village had turned up to report the disappearance of their sons: Mohammad, 19, Riyaz, 20, and Shahzad, 27, an apple farmer, a herder and a labourer. They had not seen them since 28 April and would not be calmed by detectives. Soon, their appeals drew the attention of Kashmir's most dogged human rights lawyer, Parvez Imroz, whose response to what would become known as the "Machil Encounter" was about to create a watershed in Kashmir.

Dressed in the uniform of the Kashmiri bar, a crisp white shirt and sombre morning suit, over the past two decades Imroz had become a fixture at the high court in Srinagar, filing thousands of habeas corpus actions (which literally translates as "produce the bodies") on behalf of families who claimed their relatives had vanished while in the custody of the Indian security forces.

These actions rarely succeeded, the Indian army insisting that the missing had flitted over the LoC to Pakistan, recalling historic scenes at the start of theinsurgency that terrified New Delhi, when tens of thousands of young Kashmiris jumped aboard buses manned by youthful conductors shouting: "Pakistan, Pakistan here we come." But what the writs did achieve was to create a paper trail from which Imroz was able to estimate that 8,000 Kashmiri non-combatants had vanished from army custody in a state the size of Ireland – four times more than disappeared under Pinochet in Chile. "The military grip has been suffocating," he told the Guardian, "and making someone vanish sows far more fear than spilling their blood".

Imroz had spent much of his career facing down security forces protected by specially drafted laws. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, soldiers and paramilitaries enjoy total immunity from prosecution, unless the ministry of defence sanction their trial. Using new Right to Information (RTI) laws, Imroz obtained confirmation that despite the fact that hundreds of soldiers stood accused of murder, rape and torture, not a single case had proceeded. In contrast, Kashmiri citizens are dealt with using the Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act, under which they can be jailed, preventively, for two years, if deemed likely to commit subversive acts in the future, with an estimated 20,000 detained, according to Human Rights Watch.

Imroz's campaigning achieved other things. He caught the attention of the UN, and this year Christof Heyns, a special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, warned India that all of these draconian laws had no place in a functioning democracy and should be scrapped. The price for confronting the security forces and the militants they faced down was severe. In 1992, Imroz mourned the loss of his Hindu mentor, an activist who was gunned down by Muslim insurgents. Three years later, Imroz was driving home from court when he felt a cold draught grip his chest. "I slumped over the wheel, inexplicably," he recalled. Bystanders who came to his rescue told him he had been shot. A militant group later claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. In 1996, the Indian army abducted Imroz's friend and fellow lawyer, Jalil Andrabi, whose mutilated body was found after three weeks. Imroz shut himself off. For years he refused to marry or have children, worried they would be targeted. In 2002, his accomplished protégé, Khurram Parvez, a young Kashmiri graduate, was badly injured in an IED attack that killed his driver and a female colleague, Asiya Jeelani. Two years after that, a gunman posing as a client, shot dead another of Imroz's legal allies. In 2005, when Imroz was awarded the Ludovic-Trarieux International Human Rights Prize, first given to Nelson Mandela, he was unable to accept it in person as India declined to issue him a passport.

But Imroz's reputation began to build in the countryside, from where terrified villagers travelled to besiege his rickety chambers on the Bund, in central Srinagar, carrying with them stories. In 2008, these accounts enabled the lawyer to make his greatest discovery. While surveying disappearance cases in villages across two of Kashmir's 23 districts, including Baramulla, from where the three Nadihal men would vanish in 2010, villagers showed him a hitherto unknown network of unmarked and mass graves: muddy pits and mossy mounds, pock-marking pine forests and orchards. According to eyewitnesses, all had been dug under the gaze of the Indian security forces and all contained the bodies of local men. Some were fresh, others decayed, hinting at a covert slaughter that went back many years.

Imroz widened his search, mapping almost 1,000 locations. He was shocked by the implications. Indian law requires that the police probe every violent death and that corpses be identified. But in the village of Bimyar, white-haired Atta Muhammad Khan came forward to describe how he had been forced to inter 203 unidentified bodies under cover of the night – men whose identities and crimes were unstated. "Some corpses were disfigured. Others were burnt. We did not ask questions." It was a similar story in Kichama village, where the lawyer mapped 235 unmarked graves and in Bijhama, where 200 more unidentified corpses had been interred. In Srinagar, Imroz's team alerted the government's State Human Rights Commission (SHRC). "We suspected the missing of Kashmir were buried at these secret sites," he said, publishing a report, Facts Under Ground.

An official response came two months later, just after 10pm on 30 June, 2008. Imroz had at last married Rukhsana, a business woman, and they now had two children, his daughter Zeenish, 12, and a boy, Tauqir, aged seven. The family lived in Kralpora, a tree-lined suburb eight miles from Srinagar city centre. No one called round on the offchance. Rukhsana heard a rap at the door and glanced outside to see that their security lights had been smashed. "I knew what this meant," she said, the door knock immediately conjuring memories of murdered friends. Imroz ran to the back of the house and shouted for his brother, Sheikh Mushtaq Ahmad, who lived next door.

As Ahmad emerged with a torch, a shot was fired, narrowly missing his son. A stranger screamed: "Put that light out." Then, a grenade exploded, shrapnel pitting the front door. Tear gas shells followed, waking neighbours who unlocked the village mosque. The imam mobilised residents to surround Imroz's house, as an armoured vehicle and two jeeps from the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force and police Special Task Force, took off. "They had come to kill us," Rukhsana recalled. "We need protection," she said. Who do you need protection from, I asked her. "From our own government of course. It's jungle law."

After the attack, Human Rights Watch called on India to "protect Parvez Imroz, an award-winning human rights lawyer" and his case was raised in the European parliament. His family pleaded for him to quit. "I was terrified," the lawyer conceded. "I was starting to have horrible dreams. But being silent is a crime."

Imroz and his team redoubled their efforts, spreading their net across 55 villages in three districts, Bandipora, Baramulla and Kupwara. An ad-hoc inquiry run by volunteers and funded by donations saw the number of unmarked and mass graves mapped rise to 2,700. Inside them were 2,943 bodies; 80% of them unidentified. "These were hellish images from a war that no one has ever reported," said Imroz. "We suspected this to be prima-facie evidence of war crimes," he added. "Who are the dead, how did they die, in whose hands and who interred them?"

The SHRC finally agreed to an inquiry. Soon, it had its work cut out. Using RTI laws, the police were forced to concede that they had lodged 2,683 cases for the covertly interred in just three districts. And a new deposition submitted by Imroz's field workers covering two more districts, Rajoori and Poonch, mapped 3,844 more unmarked and mass graves, taking the total number to more than 6,000. There are still another 16 districts yet to be surveyed, leaving Imroz to wonder how many violent deaths and surreptitious burials have been concealed across Kashmir. Finally, last September, the SHRC made an announcement, stating that Imroz's discovery was correct: "There is every possibility that unidentified dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves … may contain the victims of enforced disappearances." The UN weighed in this year, a report to the Human Rights Council warning India of its obligations under human rights treaties and laws. Kashmiri families had a "right to know the truth" and that "when the disappeared person is found to be dead, the right … to have the remains of their loved one returned to them, and to dispose of those remains according to their own tradition, religion or culture".

After the Nadihal men disappeared, Imroz's field worker, Parvaiz Matta, travelled to the village. He found an eyewitness, Fayaz Wani, a close friend of the missing men. Wani finally revealed the Indian army had offered the men jobs, in a deal brokered by a Special Police Officer (SPO), who had given them a sum equivalent to £7 each, "as a show of good will", before taking them to a remote army camp in Machil.

The families of the missing men filed a complaint against the SPO, Bashir Lone. "This man broke down, admitting his role, claiming that nine soldiers at a remote army camp had shot the three men, so they could claim reward money," Matta said. (The army routinely gives financial rewards to soldiers who kill militants.) On 28 May, 2010, three bodies were exhumed from unmarked graves close to the camp, some of those already mapped by Imroz, and in which the government said were foreign fighters. Their families identified Shahzad, Riyaz and Mohammad by their clothes.

The Nadihal cash-for-killing story and news of a legion of unidentified dead lying in unmarked graves, sent hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on to the streets in the summer of 2010. Sensing the building anger, the army and central government in New Delhi promised an inquiry, offering, without irony, talks to anyone in Kashmir "who renounced violence". However, when no answers came, Kashmir went into convulsions, as crowds of youths armed with stones ambushed soldiers, police and paramilitaries who returned fire with live rounds. I arrived in Kashmir shortly after. More than 100 demonstrators had been killed, many of them children. International news channels briefly took an interest, asking if Kashmir was experiencing its own Arab Spring. But the cameras left quickly, as a vicious crackdown began clearing the streets: the government's own statistics showing that more than 5,300 Kashmiri youths, many of them children, were arrested.

In 2011, Imroz went to work again, investigating how India had restored the peace, and I shadowed him. He took statements from those who had been released and the families of those still incarcerated. "The affidavits made for chilling reading," he said. The majority of youths alleged torture, with independent medical examinations confirming that many had their fingernails pulled and bones crushed. One teenage prisoner told the Guardian: "The police started on our hands and fingers, breaking them with gun butts, and by the end when tears were streaming down our faces, we were hung by our ankles and had chilli rubbed in our wounds." Others claimed to have petrol funnelled into their rectums. One group alleged in court that they were forced to sodomise each other, while a police cameraman filmed.

This year, Imroz and his field workers widened the research to commence the first state-wide inquiry into the use of torture. Their findings will go to the UN and to Human Rights Watch later this summer but a draft seen by the Guardian suggests that not only is torture endemic, it is systemic. In one cluster of 50 villages, more than 2,000 extreme cases of torture were documented, any of which would kick-start an SHRC inquiry, and all of which left victims maimed and psychologically scarred. Methods included branding, electric shocks, simulated drowning, striping flesh with razor blades and piping petrol into anuses.

This work suggests that the statewide ratio for Kashmiris who have experienced torture is one in six. "For the 50 villages, in this small snapshot, we located 50 centres run by the army and paramilitaries in which torture had been practised," Imroz said. The methods, language and even the architecture of the torture chambers are identical. "What we are looking at is not a few errant officers." Files released under RTI laws show how these practises go back to 1989. These documents, seen by the Guardian, also reveal horrific practises, including one sizeable cluster, confidentially probed by the government itself, where men from the Border Security Force (BSF) lopped off the limbs of suspects and fed prisoners with their own flesh.

The Guardian traced one of the victims, a shepherd Qalandar Khatana, 45. Hobbling on crutches, bandages covering his ankles, both feet having been sawn off, he recalled: "I was held down, a BSF trooper produced a knife and then I passed out as the blood gushed from me." His file says a government investigator confirmed the story and produced eyewitnesses.

Another villager, Nasir Sheikh, a carpenter, who lost both legs below the knee and one hand, added: "The smell was of death – urine, shit, sweat. You knew you were about to be slowly murdered. It was like being thrown down a well where no one can hear you scream." His file confirms the story and suggests that compensation be paid. The UN special rapporteur on torture has been refused entry to Kashmir since 1993. Domestic legislation to outlaw torture has stalled. "When will the world start asking as tough questions of India as it is of Syria?" Imroz asked. "Or are we Kashmiris invisible?"

Previously Published on Guardian  by Cathy Scott-Clark

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In Kashmir, Killing Ebbs, but Killers Roam Free

BONIYAR, India — After decades of war, Kashmir is blooming again. Hotels are bursting, roads are being fixed and offices rebuilt. But with the guns silenced, India must soon decide whether justice will be as welcome as the tourists.

Mass murderers walk the streets openly, having killed thousands of people who are buried in unmarked graves in scores of secret cemeteries. This beautiful village has one such graveyard. Nine years after Indian police officers and troops deposited hundreds of bullet-ridden corpses here as part of their campaign to suppress an independence movement supported by Pakistan, dirt mounds still rise above the shallow and unmarked plots as if the circumstances of the deaths left the earth above the bodies unsettled.

Atta Mohamad Raja Khan, the 70-year-old farmer who dug the graves, said one plot contained the remains of a 2-year-old boy. Others held teenagers and dowagers. Mr. Khan’s graveyard quickly filled, so he buried only a fraction of the tens of thousands killed over more than 20 years of dirty warfare.

Many of the buried were militants, including foreign mercenaries whose deaths and quick burials are often accepted as the wages of war. But myriad innocent bystanders were murdered in clumsy government plots. None of the suspected killers from the military has been arrested.

Tensions still lie just below the surface. On Monday, a fire in a revered Sufi Muslim shrine in Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital, set off clashes between the police and rock-throwing Muslim protesters. Six people were hurt after the police fired tear gas. But so far the fire has not led to wider unrest.

Jumma Khan, 45, was one of the bystanders massacred. A blacksmith’s apprentice, he lived in a mud house on a mountainside in the Anantnag district with his wife and 11 children far from any road. At 2 a.m. on March 24, 2000, soldiers broke down his door and dragged Mr. Jumma Khan away. Just four days earlier, more than a dozen gunmen dressed in fatigues had systematically massacred 34 men and boys in a nearby district, and the military was under pressure to find the killers.

Mr. Jumma Khan’s oldest child, Abdul Rashid, said his father had been targeted because he was poor and had a beard, which made him look like a militant.

“They told my mother, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be back in a half-hour,’ ” Mr. Rashid recalled in an interview on the mountainside near his home. She nonetheless threw herself on her husband, and the soldiers beat her, he said.

Later that morning, Mr. Rashid discovered that three other men in the area had been similarly taken.

The next day and miles away, Zahoor Ahmad Dalal, 22, drove home after working all day in the family’s fabric shop. He had dinner at 6 p.m. and left for his customary walk 30 minutes later. He did not return. The family fanned out to find him but never did.

The military soon announced that it had found five foreign militants responsible for the recent massacre hiding in an Anantnag hut. During the battle, the hut was burned and the militants killed, the military said. The charred bodies were buried without autopsies.

After the announcement, Mr. Rashid feared the worst, he said. His village organized a protest march to demand that they see those arrested, but the police shot and killed seven of the protesters — including Mr. Rashid’s younger brother. Local outrage grew. Facing a growing revolt, officials allowed families to unearth the bodies of the alleged militants.

Families recognized the dead immediately. In a bungled attempt to hide the victims’ identities, soldiers had forced each to don military fatigues but had neglected to remove the victims’ old clothing, still visible under the burned fatigues. Genetic tests eventually confirmed their identities. There were no foreign militants.

An investigation by India’s elite Central Bureau of Investigation charged five soldiers with murder. The Supreme Court has ordered the army to decide by the end of July whether to court-martial those involved or allow a civilian trial.

Mr. Rashid said he was not optimistic that the perpetrators would ever be brought to justice. Twelve years have already passed. “We are like worms to them,” he said. “We will be crushed under their shoes and die.”

The New York Times

India tried to suppress a secession movement in Kashmir.

Enlarge This Image

Dar Yasin/Associated Press

Arshad Andrabi with a picture of his brother Jalil, a human rights lawyer who was seized in Srinagar in 1996 and killed.

Rifat Andrabi said much the same thing. She and her husband, Jalil Andrabi, a prominent Kashmiri human rights lawyer, were driving through Srinagar in 1996 when they were stopped at a military roadblock.

Instead of simply checking the Andrabis’ identity papers, Mrs. Andrabi said, Maj. Avtar Singh took Mr. Andrabi into custody. Mrs. Andrabi, also a lawyer and the mother of three young children, panicked. Unable to drive, she hired a motorized rickshaw to follow. But the rickshaw could not keep up, and she returned home.

Mr. Andrabi’s mutilated body was found three weeks later in a burlap bag on the banks of the Jhelum River.

Mrs. Andrabi and her husband’s brother, Arshad Andrabi, have spent 16 years seeking justice against Mr. Singh and others. In the meantime, military and government authorities failed to carry out court orders to arrest Mr. Singh. When he was found to be in the United States, they declined to seek his extradition.

On June 9, Mr. Singh shot and killed his wife and two of their children in their California home before apparently committing suicide.

Mrs. Andrabi said that her three children — then 2, 3 and 6 — waited every afternoon for their father to return from work, unable to understand what his death meant.

“Every time they heard a honk at the gate or a knock on the door, they would go running and shout, ‘Papa is back!’ ” Mrs. Andrabi said through tears. “We have gone through hell, but we will not stop.”

The Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission released a report in October confirming the existence of 2,156 unmarked graves in 38 cemeteries in just three state districts. The commission recommended that state officials use genetic tests to identify the bodies, and create a commission to investigate and prosecute those responsible. Under Indian law, the state must respond within a month. Nine months have passed, and there has been no state response.

Top army officials have publicly insisted that the military’s immunity from prosecution in Kashmir, enshrined in law, is sacrosanct. And allowing even a few cases to go forward could expose many to danger, rights activists say.

Mr. Khan, the gravedigger in Boniyar, described an almost industrial body disposal process. An official usually visited a day or two before the bodies arrived to tell him the precise number of graves needed so that he could start digging. The bodies arrived by truck from far-flung areas, so many were involved, he said.

Parveena Ahangar, the chairwoman of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Jammu and Kashmir, said her group had documented hundreds of cases in which officials spirited away people who have never been seen since. In her small office, she has stacks of pink files with pictures and witness statements. The names, ranks and units of soldiers and police officers accused of perpetrating the crimes are sprinkled throughout the documents.

Ms. Ahangar says she knows the identity of the three officers who took away her 16-year-old son, Javid, on Aug. 18, 1990. She has filed repeated court petitions to have the officers punished, but nothing has happened. Military officials have offered her money to drop her petitions but she has refused such deals just as she has refused to accept that Javid is almost certainly dead, she said.

“I want my son back,” she said, “and I want justice.”

(C) Previously Published On The New York Times

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From Kashmir to California: in the footsteps of a wanted killer

Avtar Singh.

Fresno County Sheriff's Office/AP

Journalist Zahid Rafiq tells how he tried to reach Avtar Singh, a former Indian military man living outside Fresno with a dark past in Kashmir. On Saturday, Mr. Singh killed his family and himself.

A former Indian Army major placed a call Saturday morning to police outside Fresno, Calif., to inform them that he had murdered four people. By the time police arrived at the nearby scene, Avtar Singh had killed not just his family but himself, too.

Nearly two months prior, Mr. Singh had called the same Selma Country police for the last time to complain against media who wouldn’t leave him alone. I was that reporter.

I am a Kashmiri journalist studying at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Singh had been discovered last year to be living in Selma, where he ran his own trucking company. I wanted to interview this man, who was notorious back home after a judicial inquiry accused him of murdering a prominent human rights activist.

Like so much from the Kashmir conflict of the 1990s – of my childhood – the case remained unresolved, and the pain of victims left to fester.

After decades of mostly nonviolent resistance to Indian rule, Kashmiri separatists and Pakistani militants rose up with guns in 1989. India cracked down with a massive counterinsurgency that continues today, more than a decade after quashing the armed uprising. Government figures say at least 47,000 people have died in the conflict and thousands remain missing; other estimates are much higher.

Atrocities committed by Indian forces during the conflict have rarely if ever been punished. Singh’s was the rare case that made it to court in Kashmir, but he then fled the country. The magistrate put out a warrant over Interpol, and in 2011, Selma police alerted India’s Interpol bureau that they had their man.

But Singh was never extradited. In an age when the reach of international justice is growing, Singh’s case highlights how much influence international relations and national politics can still warp the process. 

“It shows the ongoing hurdles that have to be overcome,” says Matt Eisenbrandt, legal director for the Center for Justice and Accountability in Canada. He tried for a time to help locate Singh when he was missing.

“Just because a perfectly innocent human rights lawyer is murdered doesn’t mean that you always bring the bad guys to account. You still have to deal with politics, both domestically and internationally,” he says.

Why I started writing about Singh

I first heard about Singh after I became a reporter in Kashmir in 2007.  Like many reporters in the disputed region, I wrote about him and the struggle of the families of his victims for elusive justice.

Singh was wanted for the kidnapping and murder of human rights activist Jaleel Andrabi in 1996.  Months before his death, Mr. Andrabi had addressed a UN session in Geneva about human rights violations by India in Kashmir.

On the evening of March 8, 1996, Andrabi was driving home with his wife when he was stopped and taken away by Army personnel who were apparently waiting for him.

Twenty days later, police asked Andrabi’s younger brother to identify a body recovered from a jute sack in the Jhelum River. It was Andrabi: his hands tied behind his back, his eyes gouged out.

The Special Investigation Team formed to investigate the case – at the order of the high court in Kashmir – reported that everything pointed to Maj. Avtar Singh of the 35 Rashtriya Rifles unit as the person who had committed the murder. It also found that to eliminate the trail, Singh had murdered four Kashmiri counterinsurgents who had witnessed the killing.

Kashmiri police also claim to have found Singh’s involvement in five other cases of murder, including that of a young man whom he suspected of having an affair with his sister-in-law and an old Sikh tailor whom his wife’s family might have owed some money.

Soon after the death of Andrabi, Singh left Kashmir and the country, even though the court had placed restrictions against his flight abroad.

The victims’ families allege that India’s Home Ministry and External Affairs Ministry smuggled Singh out to save him from legal procedures where he might have given away the names of other officers involved in the case, and also to avoid setting a precedent for Indian soldiers accused of human right violations to appear before the law.  

“If the extradition does go through, I will open my mouth,” Singh said in an interview last year with the Indian magazine Open. “I will not keep quiet.”

JP Singh, an official with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), said he could not comment on the case. Multiple efforts to reach the Home Ministry failed. Neither ministry appears to be talking to the media about the case since Saturday’s killings.

Even before I started graduate school in Berkeley, I checked how far Selma was from campus. I wanted to speak with the man who has claimed that he was being blamed to save other culprits. I also wanted to see him, because his only two available pictures were so radically different that it was hard to believe it is the same man.

Heading to Selma

On March 26, I went to Selma.

There I met police chief Myron Dyck. In 2011, his officers arrested Singh in a domestic abuse case filed by his wife. Singh was now on a 36-month probation, Mr. Dyck said, but otherwise a free man.

I asked about why Singh was never extradited. Dyck said that Singh’s home country never wanted him back.

“When we arrested him in 2011 and found that he was wanted on the Interpol list, we informed the Interpol Washington office and they asked us to hold him till they contacted their Indian counterparts,” Dyck said.

Interpol’s Washington office confirmed this. Interpol is a communications network, designed to pass messages between law enforcement agencies across international borders. Interpol Washington passed the message that Singh was in custody in Selma to the National Central Bureau of Interpol in India.

“Quite a few contacts were made, with little to no response,” says LaTonya Miller, a spokesman at Interpol Washington. “The Indian government has to initiate whatever extradition process needs to happen.”

But they did not.

Interpol in India confirmed they received the messages. “To avoid delay, we asked them to directly contact the MEA, who do the extradition,” said an Interpol official in India who refused to be named.

“We don’t get involved with governments. We deal with police-to-police only,” says Ms. Miller in Washington.

Back in Selma, Dyck said he waited for two days for word on what to do with Singh, but when Interpol Washington couldn’t get any response, “we had to release him,” he says.

Why no deportation proceedings?

The US had another option: deportation. According to Lori Haley, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokeswoman, Singh was arrested by ICE in July 2007 for unlawful presence in the US and placed in removal proceedings.

“At the time of his death, Mr. Singh was pending removal while the ongoing investigation into his case continued,” says Ms. Haley via email, referring to an investigation by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit.

Asked if it is usual for such cases to go on for five years, she responded: “Removal cases are reviewed on a case-by-case basis and timeframe.”

In recent years, the US has been courting India after weak relations during the cold war. The US has been encouraging India to deepen its involvement inAfghanistan and with the navies on China’s periphery. In 2011, the US ambassador to India visited Kashmir but did not meet with Kashmiri separatist leaders, a suggestion at least to some that the US was willing to stay quiet on Kashmir for the good of broader US-India relations.

The US government also remained quiet in 2011 when Singh was not extradited but remained on US soil. A call to the US State Department Monday was not returned.

A low-profile life in California

After talking with Dyck, I drove by Singh’s house on Pine Street and also by his previous house on McCall Avenue. They were quiet neighborhoods, past endless vineyards and peach orchards.

Singh changed houses often enough that neither his neighbors nor the Sikh religious leaders knew much about the family. Harry Gill, president of the local Punjabi organization, knew only that the family kept a low profile.

“Not many people knew him. He didn’t tell anybody who he is or where he came from,” he told the Associated Press after the killings.

I was also asking around about Singh from journalists who had reported his domestic violence story in 2011, and had asked a Fresno-based journalist to arrange an interview for me with Singh, if possible. I was reluctant to meet Singh myself because I somehow knew he wouldn’t talk to me after finding out that I was Kashmiri.

Word had reached Singh that a Kashmiri reporter was inquiring about him and had come seeking an interview. He called me that evening. It was a calm voice, speaking in steady English, and inquired if I was the Kashmiri who was looking for him. I said yes. He asked if I was in Fresno. I lied that I was coming tomorrow. And then he shouted, using expletives.

“You think this is your father’s Kashmir. Do you have any idea where you are coming? You have such guts that you have come from Kashmir. Just set your foot in Selma and I will shoot you. I will kill you,” he yelled, jumping between native Punjabi and Hindi as he got more upset.

I asked if he knew he was threatening with death a reporter who only wanted an interview. He continued making threats, and then hung up.

A restraining order

The next morning, the Selma police called me to say that Singh had filed a complaint and got a restraining order against me that prohibited me from going close to his house, his office, or him and his family.

When I read the news of killings in Selma two days ago, I was shocked. The first thing I remembered was the long email Singh’s wife had sent to me in 2011 after I had written a story about Singh’s past in Kashmir and the need for his extradition.

She had threatened to sue my magazine and me if we didn’t apologize in the next issue. She also wrote that her husband was a soldier who had bled for his country, and had never, and would never, spill an innocent man’s blood.

Had Singh been extradited and made to face the legal system, it would have been a lifesaver for the 10 families in Kashmir who accuse Singh of killing their loved ones. It also, most likely, would have been a lifesaver for Singh’s wife and two of his children killed Saturday. A third child was badly injured but remains alive in a hospital.

“It is an unfortunate end. Not justice in any sense of the word,” says Hafizullah Mir, Andrabi’s lawyer. “Avtar Singh should have faced the court, and we should have heard his side of the story, too, and the side of the victims and then the court.”

(C) Previously published on The Christian Science Monitor

* Ben Arnoldy contributed to this report from Boston.

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