The Amshipora fake encounter

Three cousins from Rajouri

Imtiyaz Ahmed, Abrar Ahmed and Mohammed Ibrar were cousins from two hill villages in Rajouri district, in the Jammu region. Imtiyaz and Abrar came from Dharsakri, Ibrar from Tarkasi. Scroll gives their ages as twenty, sixteen and twenty-five; Abrar was still a boy. They were poor men who earned their living with their hands, and in the summer of 2020 they went to Shopian, in south Kashmir, to look for work in its orchards.

They set out on 16 July 2020. In Shopian they rented a room in Chowgam, a village on the Mughal Road, barely fifty metres from the camp of the Indian army’s 62nd Rashtriya Rifles, Kashmir Life reported. Their families heard nothing from them after 17 July. “I rang up him on July 18 but his phone was switched off,” one of the fathers said later.

Taken in the night

What happened next is set out in the charge sheet later filed by the Jammu and Kashmir Police. On 17 July Captain Bhoopendra Singh of the 62nd Rashtriya Rifles and two local men, Tabish Nazir Malik and Bilal Ahmad Lone, drove a private car to Chowgam, took the three labourers from their rented room and carried them to an unattended shelter in an orchard at Amshipora. There they were killed.

Villagers in Amshipora heard it. “I heard a single gunshot at around 2 am,” one resident told Kashmir Life. “Then there was a long silence for a few hours. Then at around 4 am more gunshots were fired followed by silence again. An hour later we heard a few explosions as well.”

Three “terrorists”

On 18 July the Indian army announced that its 62nd Rashtriya Rifles had killed three “militants” at Amshipora. The sector commander, Brigadier Ajay Kotach, spoke of inputs about “certain identified Pakistani terrorists” in the area and said that arms, ammunition and material for explosive devices had been recovered from the dead. The defence spokesman in Srinagar, Rajesh Kalia, said: “The three terrorists killed during the operation have not been identified and the bodies were buried based on established protocols.” They were buried in Baramulla district, 125 kilometres from Shopian.

The “established protocols” were new. Since April 2020 the police had stopped returning the bodies of people killed in operations to their families and had buried them instead in remote graveyards in Kupwara, Baramulla, Ganderbal and Uri. The reason first given was the coronavirus. At Amshipora the practice meant that no one who knew the three men saw their faces before they were buried as nameless “terrorists”, far from anyone who could have recognised them.

A photograph reaches Rajouri

In Rajouri the families heard nothing more. On 1 August they reported the three men missing to the police. On 10 August photographs of the three bodies surfaced, and a relative recognised one of the dead from a picture that had been circulating in Amshipora. The same day the families said publicly that the men killed in Shopian were their sons, and that they were labourers. “Imtiyaz Ahmad was working as a labourer in Shopian,” one father said.

The police took DNA samples from the parents to compare with the three men they had buried. On 25 September the Inspector General of Police in Kashmir, Vijay Kumar, announced that the samples had matched. The three “terrorists” were the missing labourers from Rajouri.

The army admits it

A week earlier the army had already conceded the essential point. On 18 September 2020 it announced that its court of inquiry had found “prima facie evidence that during the operation, powers vested under the AFSPA 1990 were exceeded”. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act is the law under which Indian troops operate in Kashmir; it bars their prosecution without the sanction of India’s defence ministry, which, Al Jazeera reported in 2023, had never been granted in any earlier case. On 29 September the police arrested the two civilians accused with the captain.

Kashmiri politicians demanded that the bodies be returned. “These young men were buried somewhere in North Kashmir,” said Omar Abdullah. “It is imperative that the bodies be exhumed & handed over to the families immediately so that a proper burial can take place near their homes in Rajouri district.” Ibrar’s father, Mohammad Yousuf, said: “We have been saying from day one that they are our children. Now the government should immediately exhume the bodies so that we can bury them in our native graveyard.”

Brought home

In early October 2020 the three bodies were exhumed from the graveyard in Baramulla, handed to the families and driven to Rajouri, and the cousins were buried in their village graveyard in Rajouri. The Lieutenant Governor, Manoj Sinha, assured the families that they would get justice. Each family was given five lakh rupees and the promise of a government job.

The money did not go far. In March 2023 Mohammad Yousuf said: “The compensation of Rs 5 lakh handed over by the government has been consumed in fighting the case. Now his child is also growing and the promise of the government to provide a job to one of the family members is still pending.”

The charge sheet

A special investigation team of the police filed its charge sheet before the chief judicial magistrate in Shopian in December 2020. It found that the three men had no links to any armed group. It accused Captain Singh, Tabish Nazir and Bilal Ahmad Lone of conspiring to abduct them and kill them in a staged encounter in order to claim prize money of twenty lakh rupees. Weapons, it said, had been placed on the bodies, the shelter had been set on fire to destroy evidence, and false information had been given to his superiors and to the police. It listed seventy-five witnesses and relied on call records and forensic reports. Lone turned approver and confessed before a magistrate.

The army replied that “the forces have no system of cash awards for its personnel for any acts in combat situations or otherwise in the line of duty”. Scroll, which examined the charge sheet, found that it did not trace the source of the planted weapons or any trail of the money, that statements of two majors, Major Kush and Major Amit Kumar Rai, had not been submitted, and that the four soldiers who fired on the shelter had not been charged.

By July 2021 the Shopian court had held thirteen hearings and had not framed charges. “I don’t even know the government lawyer who is fighting my case,” Haji Mohammad Yousuf told Scroll. “You won’t believe it but I am not even aware of the dates when our case was taken up.”

Court martial and life sentence

The captain was not tried in the Shopian court. The army chose to try him itself. Its summary of evidence was completed in late December 2020 and a general court martial began in April 2022. The proceedings closed on 16 January 2023, and the next day the court found him guilty on six charges, including murder, and sentenced him to life imprisonment, an outcome made public in March 2023 while it awaited confirmation.

On 11 November 2023 higher army authorities confirmed the conviction and cashiered him, a dishonourable dismissal. Singh, who had joined the army in 2015, lost his pension and all other benefits. For the families it was the first sign that the state would punish anyone at all.

The tribunal frees him

Two days earlier, on 9 November 2023, the principal bench of the Armed Forces Tribunal in New Delhi, headed by Justice Rajendra Menon with Lieutenant General C. P. Mohanty, had suspended the life sentence and granted him bail until his appeal is decided. He had spent three years in custody, and he walked free on 11 November. The bench held that the evidence was “not convincing enough to hold the applicant guilty”, that his confession was not admissible and that reliance on the approver’s statement was improper, and said that the likelihood of his acquittal on appeal “cannot be ruled out”. He must report to the tribunal’s registrar each month and has surrendered his passport.

The same order raised the question that the police had left alone. The tribunal found that “there cannot be any motive for the applicant to eliminate three civilians” without the knowledge of his commanding officer, and called the commanding officer’s claim that he had known nothing “totally untrustworthy”. It noted testimony that location details had been shared and chats deleted from a WhatsApp group. No senior officer has been charged.

The fathers answer

“When Singh was given a life sentence, I was content that at least the person who confessed to killing my sons in cold blood will spend the rest of his life in jail,” said Haji Mohammad Yousuf. “Now, he has been set free. How is that justice? How can I now believe that I will get justice?” He said that he would go to the Supreme Court if he had to: “I will sell the land I had kept for my son. I will fight as long as there is breath in me.”

Sabir Hussain, Abrar’s father, said: “We are poor people and feel we were denied justice.” And: “We will not stay silent and challenge the order of the tribunal.” Bagha Khan, the father of Imtiyaz, said: “We will move the higher court and appeal against the order of the tribunal. This is not acceptable to us as a compensation of Rs five lakh and a job with a salary of Rs 14,000 are not worth the lives of our children.”

What Amshipora shows

Amshipora went further than almost any killing in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir. The army admitted the wrong within two months, the police named an officer and a court martial convicted him of murder. It then followed the course of Machil, where three villagers were killed in 2010 and passed off as “foreign militants”, and where the Armed Forces Tribunal suspended the life sentences of five soldiers in July 2017. The police charge sheet pointed to the incentive: a dead “terrorist” is counted as a success and, it alleged, was to bring prize money, and a body buried far away without a name is hard to reclaim.

When this article was reviewed, the captain was free on bail, no decision on his appeal had been reported, the trial of the two civilians in Shopian had produced no reported verdict, and the question the tribunal itself had raised, who else knew, had not been put to any court. The three cousins lie in Rajouri, the only part of the case that has been put right.