Kashmir HopeMemory · Rights · FreedomMarch 1996 · Srinagar
The abduction and killing of Jalil Andrabi
Jalil Andrabi, a Kashmiri human rights lawyer who had taken Kashmir’s case to the United Nations in Geneva, was taken from his car in Srinagar by Indian army soldiers of the 35th Rashtriya Rifles on 8 March 1996 and found in the Jhelum on 27 March, shot in the head, his hands tied and his eyes gouged out. The army told the High Court it did not hold him, but a police team set up on the court’s order named Major Avtar Singh. Singh was never produced in court, fled to Canada and California, and in 2012 killed his family and himself; no one has ever been tried for Andrabi’s murder.
A lawyer for the detained
Jalil Andrabi was a lawyer in Srinagar who documented, case by case, what Indian rule was doing to his people after the uprising of 1989. From 1984 he had filed petitions in the Jammu and Kashmir High Court on behalf of detainees, and he made public the fact that India’s forces routinely ignored the court’s orders to produce the people they had taken. He was also a political activist associated with the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, which stood for an independent Kashmir.
In the crackdowns of those years a habeas corpus petition was often the only record a family had of a son taken by Indian forces. Andrabi’s work was to turn such cases into court records and to carry them abroad.
Geneva and the threats
In 1995 Andrabi spoke at the session of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva and denounced what he called India’s “military aggression” to crush political dissent in Kashmir. After he came home there were two attempts on his life, Kashmir Life reported, and he left for a time for Delhi.
On 29 January 1996 two men came to his house in Srinagar asking for him on a human rights matter, left, and returned with a third; outside, Human Rights Watch was told, two taxis waited with eight more men, some openly armed. The next morning they came again. One appeared to wear a uniform and to carry a weapon under his pheran. Andrabi photographed them from an upstairs window and they drove off. Neighbours said that the taxi had been escorted by a Border Security Force vehicle until it was within a hundred yards of the outer gate of his neighbourhood. About a week before those visits, Andrabi had told Human Rights Watch that he had been warned he “would be next”. At the time he was preparing to go back to Geneva for the next session of the Commission.
Taken on the road home
At about six in the evening of 8 March 1996 Andrabi was driving home with his wife, Rifat, near the Saddar police station in Srinagar, a few hundred yards from their house. A Rashtriya Rifles unit of the Indian army stopped the car. He was ordered out and taken away. Rifat, who could not drive, was left in the car. She later said that a private car had accompanied the army party. “I followed the military vehicle in an auto till the National Highway where I lost their trail,” she told Kashmir Life.
Human Rights Watch later named the officer: Major Avtar Singh, known as Bulbul, of the 35th Rashtriya Rifles. He commanded a company of the battalion at Rawalpora in Srinagar, which kept a large band of pro-government gunmen, Kashmiris known as Ikhwanis, working for it. According to what the investigators were later told, one of them, Sikander Ganai of Ganderbal, was part of the party that took Andrabi.
The army denies holding him
On 9 March the Jammu and Kashmir Bar Association filed a petition for habeas corpus in the High Court, and the court ordered the army to produce Andrabi. The army denied that he was in its custody. For two weeks the court kept granting the government more time to reply.
On the morning of 27 March a college student, Abid Hussain, saw a body floating down the Jhelum. It was found in the Kursu Rajbagh area of Srinagar, in a jute sack. Andrabi’s younger brother was called to identify it. Andrabi’s hands had been tied behind his back, he had been shot in the head and his eyes had been gouged out. He had been dead for at least a week; the autopsy showed that he had been killed days after his arrest.
The world takes notice
The killing of a lawyer who had addressed the United Nations drew protest abroad. The United States condemned the murder and called for a “full and transparent investigation”. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, José Ayala Lasso, urged India to “undertake a thorough investigation”. India’s National Human Rights Commission said it would send a team to Kashmir.
In Srinagar the High Court set up a Special Investigation Team of the police to find out who had killed him. An anonymous caller told its officers to look for Sikander Ganai. They were too late. On 5 April 1996 five bodies were found at Chandhar, on the Srinagar to Jammu highway near Pampore: Ganai himself, two other Ikhwanis, a carpenter from Bihar and a taxi driver, Mohammad Afzal Malik, whom they had taken from Budgam. According to testimony reported by Kashmir Life and Open, Ganai had not reported to Major Singh for a week after the abduction; summoned to the major’s camp, he and his companions were attacked in its dining hall by Singh and his men, who tied them with ropes, and the next day they were found dead.
The investigators name him
The investigators’ key witness was Mohammed Ashraf Khan, known as Umer, a former fighter who had surrendered and worked at the major’s camp. He described how Singh and his men brought in a man dressed in a suit and tie, how the man argued about being taken, was beaten and locked away, and was then shot. A photograph showed Singh and Umer together in uniform, carrying weapons. On 10 April 1997 the Special Investigation Team filed its report in court naming Major Avtar Singh. It found that Singh had killed the gunmen who had witnessed the murder to remove the trail.
The army did not hand him over. A colonel told the court that the major had acted in his personal capacity and had been “disembodied” from service after a year in Kashmir. The state’s counsel said that he belonged to the Territorial Army, an irregular force under contract with the army, that his contract had expired and that he could not be found. The court ordered the government to impound his passport or refuse him one. Before the next hearing, the two judges were transferred. “Major Avtar Singh should have faced trial,” Justice Bilal Nazki, one of them, said years later. “Soon after I passed orders in the case, I was transferred to Hyderabad.”
A fugitive in plain sight
Avtar Singh was not hard to find. He came from the Territorial Army’s 103 unit at Ludhiana, and he had four presidential medals for operations in Assam and Kashmir. In 1998 a journalist interviewed him at the Territorial Army barracks in Ludhiana, where he said he was being made a scapegoat. In 2000 the investigators told the court that he was still in Ludhiana, and on 26 December 2000 they filed a charge sheet. Kashmir Life reported that he was eventually arrested and handed to his parent unit, and that it was from army custody that he fled to Canada in 2003, on a passport the court had ordered withheld.
Rights activists in Canada pressed for him to be refused asylum, and by 2005 the family had crossed illegally into California; in 2008 they settled in Selma, near Fresno. In July 2007 United States immigration officers arrested him for unlawful presence and began removal proceedings. In 2009 Andrabi’s lawyers, helped by the Canadian Centre for International Justice, located him there. India did not move for his return.
Found and let go
On 21 February 2011 the Selma police arrested Singh after his wife reported him for domestic violence, and found an Interpol notice against his name. The police chief, Myron Dyck, waited two days for India to ask for him. No request came, and Singh was released on bail. Dyck later said that Singh’s home country had never wanted him back. An Indian police officer, Raja Ajaz Ali, announced a fresh arrest warrant. “It is not by the efforts of the Indian government that Major Avtar Singh is cornered. It’s by an accident,” said Andrabi’s brother Arshad, also a lawyer. “There is a little hope of justice with this system, but we will not give up.”
On 30 May 2011 a court in Srinagar directed the authorities “to expedite the matter and make every endeavour to extradite the accused at the earliest, so that majesty of rule of law is not dented”. Singh told a journalist on the telephone that there was “no question of my being taken to India alive, they will kill me”, and that if he were sent back, “I will not keep quiet.” His immigration consultant said that Indian officials did not want him back “because they didn’t want him to talk”.
Selma, June 2012
On the morning of 9 June 2012 Avtar Singh shot his wife and their three sons, aged three, fifteen and seventeen, and then killed himself. Neighbours heard eleven shots. His wife and two of the boys died in the house; the third, gravely wounded, died in hospital days later.
“These lives could have been saved if a trial of Maj. Avtar Singh was conducted on time. We have lost that chance now,” said Arshad Andrabi. Hafizullah Mir, a lawyer in the Andrabi case, said: “It is an unfortunate end. Not justice in any sense of the word. 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.”
Other families, same officer
Andrabi’s family was not alone. The police investigation accused Singh of involvement in the deaths of six other Kashmiri men, and ten families in Kashmir accuse him of killing their relatives. Ghulam Qadir Kanni, a cook, was taken from Batamaloo in a search operation on 18 February 1996; three months later his family was brought a body that was not his, and he has never been found. “Do you have any way that would help me in finding my husband?” his wife asked Kashmir Life. Imtiyaz Ahmed Wani, seventeen, was taken from Ikhrajpora in May 1996 and has never been seen again. In his case the police sent the names of six soldiers, Singh among them, to India’s home ministry in 2000 for sanction to prosecute; by 2013, the chief prosecuting officer told Kashmir Life, the ministry had not replied. Abdul Majid Shah’s body was pulled from the Jhelum bearing marks of torture.
Arshad Andrabi identified his brother’s body, later married his widow and raised his three children. Jalil’s son was six or seven when his father was killed. Once he asked why his father’s body had been fished out of the Jhelum. “Since that day, he has never asked me anything about his father, nothing at all,” his uncle told Open.
What the case shows
Few killings in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir were investigated as closely as Jalil Andrabi’s. The High Court took up the case the day after he was taken, an investigation team named the officer a little over a year later, and the world was watching. Even so, the army first told the court that it did not have him, then said its officer had acted on his own, then that he was no longer its man and could not be found. The witnesses were killed, the judges were moved, a passport was issued against a court’s order and a fugitive was left unclaimed in California for years.
Human Rights Watch wrote in 1999 that it was “not aware of a single prosecution in a case of the torture or summary execution of a detainee” in the ten years since the conflict began. “It has been 16 years now but no one has been booked for his murder,” Kashmir Life wrote in 2013. Andrabi spent his working life asking the courts to make the state produce the Kashmiris it had taken. In his own case the state never produced the man it had named, and no one has ever stood trial for his murder.