The Hyderpora killings

An evening in Hyderpora

At a quarter past five on the evening of 15 November 2021, soldiers of the Indian army’s 2nd Rashtriya Rifles, with the police Special Operations Group and paramilitary troops, cordoned off a commercial building at Hyderpora, in Srinagar. The building held shops and offices. When the firing stopped, four people inside or beside it were dead. The police announced what they called an encounter with “militants”.

Three of the dead were men from Srinagar and the hills who had come to the building that day to work. Their families have said from the first night that none of them was armed and that the forces killed them.

The men who died

Mohammad Altaf Bhat owned the building and ran a hardware business there. Dr Mudasir Gul, a dentist who had turned to business, rented an office in it; he had a two-year-old daughter. Amir Magrey, a young man from Gool in Ramban district, in the hills of the Jammu region, worked for Gul as an office assistant. “My son was innocent and he was just doing his work in that building to earn for his family,” his father said.

The police named the fourth man as Haider, also called Bilal Bhai, and said that he was a fighter from Pakistan.

Three police versions

The Inspector General of Police for Kashmir, Vijay Kumar, said that night that Gul had been “an active associate of the militants”. Bhat, he said, had died in the crossfire, but would be “counted as a harbourer of militants as he had tenants and not informed the police about them”. Magrey was presented as the associate of the man from Pakistan. Omar Abdullah, a former chief minister, said that he had never heard of “Hybrid militants”, a new police category.

Later, in an affidavit to the High Court, the police said that the 2nd Rashtriya Rifles had acted on its own “reliable information”, that those inside had fired first, and that two “militants” and two of their “associates” had been killed. The army’s 15 Corps had said publicly that the operation was based on intelligence from the police. The police dismissed the contradiction as irrelevant.

What the families saw

Altaf Bhat’s daughter Noha said: “There was no firing from the other side.” Her father, she said, had been used by the forces as a human shield. A witness, Nazir Ahmad, said that the police took Bhat away twice to search him, and then took Gul and another person with them. “They did not return after that,” he said.

Gul’s wife, Humaira, said: “I give licence to the police to kill me and my two-year-old daughter if my husband turns out to be a militant.” His brother Muzammil said that Gul had no link to any armed group. Bhat’s younger daughter, Maisara, said: “He was not involved in any crime.”

Buried in Handwara

The families were not given the bodies. On 16 November the police buried all four at the Wadder Payeen graveyard in Handwara, in Kupwara district, between ninety and a hundred kilometres from Srinagar.

This had been policy since April 2020. The police stopped returning the bodies of people killed in operations and buried them in remote graveyards in Kupwara, Baramulla, Ganderbal and Uri. Vijay Kumar first gave the coronavirus as the reason: “If we allow for identification at encounter sites and permit burial at their native places, huge gatherings might spread infection of Covid-19.” The police chief said that India’s home ministry had advised by letter that the bodies not be returned. According to the scholar Sumantra Bose, the bodies of at least 20,000 fighters killed since 1990, most of them from the Valley, had always been given back to their families; senior security officials, he records, said that New Delhi had first sought the change in 2018, and that it was pushed through once Jammu and Kashmir had been reduced to a territory ruled from New Delhi. In 2020 at least 158 people, and in 2021 nearly 180, were buried in this way. The administration later told the Supreme Court that “the state consciously does not bury them in the same town or in the same village”, to prevent what it called glorification.

A sit-in for the dead

On 17 November the families of Bhat and Gul sat in protest at the Press Enclave in Srinagar and asked for the bodies. Around midnight the electricity in the area was cut, the police removed them by force and several relatives were taken into preventive custody. “Instead of handing over mortal remains of the innocent civilians, police has arrested the family members,” said Mehbooba Mufti, another former chief minister.

The next day Omar Abdullah led a sit-in of his own. “I want their bodies to be exhumed from Handwara and the same be handed over to their families for last rites,” he said. That evening the bodies of Altaf Bhat and Mudasir Gul were dug up at Handwara under the supervision of the local tehsildar and a team of doctors, and the two men were buried again in Srinagar, with the number of mourners restricted. Amir Magrey’s family lived far away in the hills of Ramban, and his body stayed in Handwara.

The magistrate’s inquiry

On 19 November the administration of the Lieutenant Governor, Manoj Sinha, ordered a magisterial inquiry by the Additional District Magistrate of Srinagar, Khurshid Ahmad Shah, to be completed in fifteen days. No independent eyewitness came forward, and no footage was recovered from the cameras of the shops around the building. Bhat’s brother, Abdul Majid Bhat, worried that “the police might have planted anything in the building, as there was no one from the family accompanying them”.

On 4 December the Lieutenant Governor said that the report would come “in the next three days” and promised strict action if innocent people had been killed. It went to the government and has never been published. “He asked us to wait for two days for the investigation to be completed, but now it’s been more than a month and we have not even been given his dead body despite our repeated pleas,” Latief Magrey said in late December. Meanwhile the police wrote to Bhat’s brother asking for proof of ownership and trading permits before they would return the building.

The police clear the forces

On 28 December 2021 a police Special Investigation Team under Deputy Inspector General Sujith K. Singh announced its findings. It found no foul play by the forces. Gul, it said, had been shot in the attic by the fighter from Pakistan, and “the security forces did not go to the attic at all”. Bhat and Magrey had died in crossfire after he used them as human shields. Magrey, it said, had been the fighter’s associate; the investigators pointed to his degree from a seminary in Bandipora and said that he had been “absconding since 2018”.

The families rejected all of it. “First the police said Bhat was an associate of militants. Then they said he was killed in cross-firing. Now they are saying he was taken as a human shield,” said Abdul Majid Bhat. “There was a blunt injury on the back of his head, his eye and mouth were swollen and his legs were bruised. How did he suffer those injuries if he was killed in firing?” Humaira Gul said: “The truth was killed with the murder of my husband and the other two people. Why would a doctor stake his career, his little daughter and ageing parents for nothing? The police are speaking lies.” The investigators answered critics with a warning that their statements “may attract appropriate penal provisions as envisaged under law”.

A father in court

Amir Magrey’s father, Mohammad Latief Magrey, was the last man anyone would have expected to hear called the father of a “militant”. On 6 August 2005 a gunman of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based group, had attacked his home in Gool and opened fire on his family. Latief and his relatives killed the attacker, a cousin died in the firing, and in 2012 the state gave him its award for bravery. On 30 December 2021 he asked the High Court for his son’s body.

On 27 May 2022 Justice Sanjeev Kumar held that the refusal to let him take the body home was “per-se arbitrary” and violated the constitutional guarantees of equality and of life with dignity. The government had argued that Amir was “a confirmed terrorist” and Bhat and Gul only “associates”; the judge found the distinction illogical, observed that the refusal seemed to rest on the family’s remote home and lack of local influence rather than on any lawful procedure, and ordered the body exhumed and taken to his village, or, if it was no longer in a state to be handed over, five lakh rupees paid and the family allowed to perform the last rites at the grave. A division bench stayed the order on 3 June, and on 1 July 2022 Chief Justice Pankaj Mithal and Justice Javed Iqbal Wani refused exhumation, allowing the family only to pray at the grave and keeping the compensation.

The Supreme Court, in a bench of Justices Surya Kant and J. B. Pardiwala, dismissed the father’s appeal on 12 September 2022. “Once buried a body should not be disturbed,” it held, adding that a court of law must decide the rights of parties not on sentiment but “in accordance with law”. His counsel, Anand Grover, had argued that the last rites were a sacred right: “These religious rites cannot be usurped by the state.” A review petition was dismissed in chambers in January 2023.

A headstone at Wadder Payeen

On 30 July 2023, more than nineteen months after the killing, Latief Magrey, his wife, three of their sons and a daughter stood at the grave in Handwara for the first time. They recited the Quran, prayed and set a headstone. The compensation had been paid nine days earlier, after the family filed a contempt petition. “I was restless and couldn’t even sleep,” the father told The Wire. “I feel relaxed now, but the pain of losing him at a young age is killing me.” He said he would go on trying to clear his son of “the label of militancy”.

What Hyderpora shows

Hyderpora shows how a killing in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir is closed. The only findings made public are those of the police, who examined an operation in which the police had taken part. The magistrate’s report was never published. The bodies of two men from the city were returned after their families sat in protest and two former chief ministers took up their cause; the family from the hills of Ramban got a grave a hundred kilometres from Srinagar and a ruling that it must stay there.

The same rule fell on others. Athar Mushtaq, sixteen, killed by Indian forces in what they called an encounter at Lawaypora in Srinagar on 29 December 2020, was buried at Sonamarg, more than 140 kilometres from home. “I didn’t get his body but I just had his shoes for the burial,” said his father, Mushtaq Ahmad Wani, who with six relatives was charged under India’s anti-terror law for protesting to get it back.

When this article was reviewed, no charge against any member of the forces over the Hyderpora killings had been reported, and Amir Magrey still lay at Wadder Payeen, far from the village where his father wants to bury him.