The secret hanging of Afzal Guru

A medical student from Sopore

Mohammad Afzal Guru was born on 30 June 1969 in Doabgah, a village near Sopore in the north of the Kashmir Valley. He enrolled at the Jhelum Valley Medical College and completed the first year of a medical degree before he gave it up. Like thousands of young Kashmiris in the uprising against the Indian occupation, he joined the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front.

In 1993 or 1994 he surrendered to India’s Border Security Force. He could not find a government job, and he set up in business selling medicines and surgical instruments on commission, earning, by his own account, four to five thousand rupees a month. In 1998 he married Tabassum, and they had a son, Ghalib.

Life under the Special Task Force

In Indian-occupied Kashmir surrender did not free him from the police. In a letter he wrote in 2004 to his Supreme Court lawyer, Sushil Kumar, Afzal described what followed. He paid local special police officers three hundred or sometimes five hundred rupees to be left alone in his business. One morning, as he rode his scooter, men of the police Special Task Force took him to their camp at Palhalan, where, he wrote, Deputy Superintendent Vinay Gupta tortured him with electric shocks, cold water, petrol, chillies and other techniques.

At the Special Task Force camp at Humhama, he wrote, Deputy Superintendent Davinder Singh also tortured him: “One of his torture inspector as they called him Shanty Singh electrified me naked for 3 hours and made me drink water while giving electric shocks through telephone instrument.” The officers demanded money for his release: “my family sold the gold of my wife”, and the force took his scooter as well. Afterwards, he wrote, another prisoner at Humhama, Tariq, advised him always to co-operate with the force, or it would never let him live a normal life.

Then came the request that, by his account, decided his fate. Davinder Singh “told me that I had to do a small job for him that has to took one man to Delhi as I was well aware about Delhi and has to manage a rented house for him”. Afzal did not know the man: “I suspected that this man is not Kashmiri as he did not speak in Kashmiri but I was helpless to do what Dravinder told me.” The man was called Mohammad, and he was one of the five men killed in the attack on parliament. “In the parliament attack case I was entrapped by Special Task Force of Kashmir,” Afzal wrote.

The attack on parliament

On 13 December 2001 five armed men drove into the grounds of India’s parliament in New Delhi and opened fire. They killed eight security personnel and a gardener and injured sixteen people, and all five were shot dead. The police named as the organisers leaders of the banned Jaish-e-Mohammed, a group based in Pakistan, who were never brought before the court. Within days the police arrested four people. Afzal was picked up in Srinagar on 15 December; by his account he was taken from the bus stand as he was about to leave for Sopore, held at the Parimpora police station and the Special Task Force headquarters, and flown to Delhi blindfolded.

A trial without his lawyer

He was tried by a special court under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The Supreme Court’s own record shows how he was defended. A lawyer first offered to him, Attar Alam, was not willing to act. The charge sheet was filed on 14 May 2002, and Afzal had no counsel until 17 May. The lawyer then appointed by the court, Seema Gulati, conceded that there was material to frame charges, and on 5 June agreed with the other defence counsel that post-mortem reports and records of the recovery of weapons could be admitted without formal proof, so that many prosecution witnesses were never called. On 1 July she asked to be discharged because she had been engaged by another accused, and her junior, Neeraj Bansal, took over. On 8 July Afzal told the court he was not satisfied and named four senior advocates; on 12 July the judge recorded that none of them would take the case.

On 18 December 2002 the special court sentenced him to death. Afzal wrote that he “was never given an [a] chance in [the] designated court to tell the real story”. The People’s Union for Democratic Rights, an Indian civil liberties organisation, held that he “had no legal representation as no lawyers were ready to represent him for fear of reprisal”, that he “had been subjected to brutal torture”, and that the identification of the accused by witnesses could hardly be independent after he had been broadcast “as the face of terror”.

The collective conscience

On 4 August 2005 the Supreme Court confirmed the death sentence, and Afzal alone of the accused was left facing the rope. The court’s reasoning undercut much of the case. It held that “it is not safe to act on the alleged confessional statement of Afzal”, given the lapses and violations of procedural safeguards in how the police had recorded it. It set aside his conviction for membership of a banned organisation under the anti-terror law, because “there is no evidence that he is a member of a terrorist gang or a terrorist organization, once the confessional statement is excluded”. It accepted that “there is and could be no direct evidence of the agreement amounting to criminal conspiracy”, and found the conspiracy proved by circumstances. On his defence, it held that the court need not “go on searching for some other counsel to the liking of the accused. The right to legal aid cannot be taken thus far.”

On the sentence it wrote: “The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if the capital punishment is awarded to the offender.” He was, the judges added, “a surrendered militant” who was “a menace to the society and his life should become extinct”. The court accepted that he had not taken part in the attack itself. It sent him to the gallows in the name of that conscience.

A secret hanging

In 2006 his wife petitioned the President for mercy, and the execution was put off. On 3 February 2013 President Pranab Mukherjee rejected the petition. Afzal, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties states, “was informed of rejection of his mercy petition only a couple of hours before his execution”; he was number twenty-one in the queue of prisoners on death row, and “the queue was broken to hang him secretly”. He was hanged in Tihar Jail early on the morning of Saturday 9 February 2013.

His family was not told in time. The home minister, Sushilkumar Shinde, said that a letter had been sent by speed post on the night of 7 February. The chief postmaster general of Jammu and Kashmir, John Samuel, said it reached Srinagar by air on the Saturday evening, hours after the hanging, and was delivered on Monday 11 February because Sunday was a holiday. It was addressed to Tabassum. The family had heard the news from a television channel. Afzal had last seen his wife and son in August 2012. “In the age of information and technology, when life has become so fast, is it fair to send a letter through speed post?” his cousin Farooq Ahmad Buhroo asked. “What is the use of this letter now?”

Even Kashmir’s chief minister, Omar Abdullah, spoke out. “As a human being, I find it very difficult to reconcile myself to the fact that we executed a person who was not given the opportunity to see his family for the last time,” he said. “If in this day and age, we are relying on speed post to inform a family that their loved one is going to be executed, there is something seriously wrong.” Within a year the Supreme Court, in Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India, required a gap of at least fourteen days between the rejection of a mercy petition and an execution. It came too late for Afzal.

A body kept in Tihar

He was buried inside the prison, beside Maqbool Bhat. His family asked for the body so that he could be buried in his hometown, and Omar Abdullah and the opposition leader Mufti Mohammad Sayeed supported them. On 11 March 2013 Shinde told reporters in New Delhi that the body had been buried according to the jail manual and that “there was no way it could be handed over”; the family, he said, could visit the grave in Delhi. In March 2015 the Home Ministry refused again, calling the demand one “made for political reasons” and saying that he had been buried as per the jail manual “in an unmarked grave”.

In Srinagar an empty grave was dug for him in 2013 at the Eidgah, beside the empty grave of Maqbool Bhat. Like Bhat’s, its inscription says that his body is a debt on the Government of India.

Curfew and three deaths

The authorities had ordered most of the Valley indoors before the hanging was announced. Cable television and mobile internet were cut. Police went to the printing presses: Greater Kashmir was told not to publish its Sunday edition, copies of Kashmir Reader were seized, and its editor said the police gave “verbal orders not to publish for four days”. Kashmiri politicians were told to stay in New Delhi.

People came out anyway, at a dozen places. At Watergam near Sopore police and paramilitary troops fired tear gas and bullets at a crowd, and Obaid Mushtaq, aged twelve, died of his injuries early on 11 February. At Sumbal a young man jumped into the freezing river to escape troops firing tear gas and drowned, and the body of a high school student missing since the same protest was later taken from the river. More than a hundred people were detained. The curfew lasted a week and was eased on 16 February, and the Hurriyat Conference extended its strike.

The officer he named

On 11 January 2020 police stopped a car on the Jammu-Srinagar highway in Kulgam. In it were Deputy Superintendent Davinder Singh, still serving and posted to the anti-hijacking unit at Srinagar airport, two fighters of Hizbul Mujahideen, Naveed Mushtaq and Rafi Ahmed Rather, and another man, heading towards Jammu. Singh had served in the Special Operations Group, the renamed Special Task Force, since the 1990s, and had received a gallantry medal. He was the officer Afzal had named in his letter sixteen years earlier.

At a press conference the police chief of Kashmir, Vijay Kumar, said: “On record, as many media outlets have written, he was linked to the militant involved in the 2001 Parliament attack. We have no such thing in our records.” Scroll reported that in 2006 Singh had admitted to the journalist Parvaiz Bukhari that he tortured Afzal; Kumar said he would look into it. Kashmiri parties had demanded after the hanging that Afzal’s account of a set-up be investigated. No inquiry into it is known to have been held.

What the case shows

Every 9 February, Kashmiris mark the anniversary together with Maqbool Bhat’s two days later. In February 2020, in the first strike call since India stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy in August 2019, the banned Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front called shutdowns for both days, and in 2021 the Valley shut again. Outside Kashmir the date itself became a charge: after students at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi held an event on 9 February 2016 on the death sentences of Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhat, the Delhi Police arrested the student leader Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition.

In September 2025 an organisation that Maktoob Media describes as Hindu right-wing asked the Delhi High Court to remove the graves of Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhat from Tihar, if necessary to a secret location. The court observed that no law prohibits burial inside a jail, and the petition was withdrawn and dismissed on 24 September 2025. His remains were still in Tihar when this article was reviewed.

The case shows how India’s system of justice treated a Kashmiri. A man who had surrendered was, by his account, tortured and extorted by the police for years. The officer he accused of handing him one of the attackers is not known to have been investigated for it, and was later caught in a car with armed men heading for Jammu. Afzal went to trial without a lawyer of his choosing, was convicted after the highest court threw out his confession and accepted that there could be no direct evidence of the conspiracy, and was hanged to satisfy a collective conscience. He was hanged in secret, his family told by a letter that arrived two days late, and his body kept by the state that killed him.