The Machil fake encounter

Three men from Nadihal

Shahzad Ahmad Khan was twenty-seven, Riyaz Ahmad Lone twenty and Mohammad Shafi Lone nineteen. They came from Nadihal, a village in the Rafiabad area of Baramulla district in north Kashmir, and all three worked for a living: Shafi had left school after the sixth class, and Riyaz had never been to school. Shahzad, married with a small son, had given up labouring to sell fruit in Baramulla. Of the two younger men, one worked at a mechanic’s shop and the other as a labourer.

On 29 April 2010 they left home for what they had been told was work. “My son told me while leaving the home in the morning that he would be back by 3pm,” Riyaz’s mother later told Kashmir Life. None of the three came back alive.

Sold for fifty thousand rupees

The offer came from men who worked for the Indian army. Bashir Ahmad Lone, a former special police officer from Nadihal itself, promised the three jobs as army porters at two thousand rupees a day. He worked with Abdul Hamid Bhat, an army informer, and Abbas Hussain Shah, a soldier of the Territorial Army from Uri. Bashir and Hamid drove the three in a Tata Sumo to Kalaroos in Kupwara district, where they were handed to soldiers of the 4th Rajputana Rifles. The three young men had been sold to the army for fifty thousand rupees each.

Kupwara lies along the Line of Control, the ceasefire line that divides Kashmir, and is among the most heavily militarised parts of a land that is itself among the most militarised in the world. There, a dead “infiltrator” was worth money and advancement to the soldiers who produced one.

A staged encounter

That night, near the Line of Control in the Machil sector, the three were shot dead. On 30 April the army announced that it had killed three Pakistani “terrorists” in the Machil sector. The unit registered a case describing the dead as “unidentified militants” who had infiltrated across the Line of Control, and an army spokesman in Srinagar claimed that five assault rifles had been recovered from them. The bodies were buried at Kalaroos as unidentified. Their faces had been painted black, and they were dressed in the loose shirts and trousers known as Pathan suits. Riyaz’s mother said later that the soldiers had drawn a beard on her son’s face with a black marker “to make him look like a terrorist”. Their mothers said that they had left home in trousers, shirts and sweaters.

When the graves were later opened, Kashmir Life reported, the three were found to be “clean-shaven, well dressed”, in summer clothing and summer shoes, and “all three were killed from very close range and had bullets in their heads”. The same report said that the unit’s major had paid Shah and Hamid a hundred and fifty thousand rupees and two bottles each of whisky and beer, and that a cash reward of six hundred thousand rupees for killing three “infiltrators” was being processed for the major and his team at the level of the commanding officer, D. K. Pathania. The police case was that the killing had been staged for such rewards and for promotion.

The families find their sons

The families reported the three missing on 10 May, and a case was registered. The police in Sopore traced the calls made on the men’s phones, arrested Bashir Ahmad Lone on 21 May and Abdul Hamid soon after, and followed the trail to Kalaroos. When the families recognised their sons in newspaper photographs of the dead, the district commissioner of Baramulla ordered the graves opened, and about a month after the killing the families identified the bodies. “I thank God Almighty first and then SP Sopore who helped us lot to find out bodies of our children,” Mohammad Yousuf Lone said.

Kashmiris had heard many accounts of staged killings and seen few of them proved. This one was proved within weeks, by the state’s own police, and the news spread through the Valley at the end of May. Protests began in the north and reached Srinagar. On 11 June a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, Tufail Mattoo, was killed by a police tear gas shell in the city, and the protests became the uprising of 2010. Al Jazeera and Open magazine later linked the Machil killings to the unrest in which 123 people died that year.

The army shields its men

The police charged eleven people: the battalion’s commanding officer, two majors, five soldiers and the three men who had delivered the victims. The army insisted on trying its own men under the Army Act. The Chief Judicial Magistrate at Sopore rejected its request, and the Principal District and Sessions Judge at Baramulla turned it down again; the army went to the High Court and ordered its own court of inquiry. In the end the soldiers were tried by the army itself.

At the end of 2010 Mohammad Yousuf Lone said that in eight months the families had not once seen the accused soldiers. “I need no compensation. I want justice,” he said. He no longer went outside the village even for work, he said, for fear of being harmed for pursuing the case.

The two civilians stayed in the ordinary courts. Bashir Ahmad Lone and Abdul Hamid Bhat were tried before the additional sessions court in Sopore for abduction with intent to murder, murder and criminal conspiracy, and they were still in jail in October 2017. The driver of the Sumo, the one witness who linked Nadihal to the army camp, turned hostile.

The court martial

On 25 December 2013 the army announced that six of its men, among them two officers, would face a general court martial. Presided over by Brigadier Deepak Mehra, it sat through most of 2014. In November 2014 the army made the verdict public: the commanding officer of the battalion, Colonel Dinesh Pathania, Captain Upendra Singh and soldiers of the unit were sentenced to life imprisonment for “killing civilians, hatching a conspiracy and later branding the dead as Pakistani militants”. The army’s Northern Command confirmed the sentences in September 2015.

Reports differ on how many were convicted. The Tribune named seven, including the two officers, and reported that the Territorial Army soldier Abbas Hussain Shah was acquitted; later reports list five or six convicts. It was said to be the first case in the Kashmir Valley in which soldiers were given life terms on such a charge, and Omar Abdullah, then chief minister, called it a “watershed moment”. When the court martial was announced, the ruling National Conference had asked that the proceedings “be made transparent so that there is no scope for any allegation or feeling of a cover up”.

Freed by the tribunal

In July 2017 the Armed Forces Tribunal, in a bench headed by Justice V. K. Shali, suspended the life sentences of five of the convicted men, Colonel Dinesh Pathania, Captain Upendra Singh, Havildar Devender Kumar and Lance Naiks Lakhmi and Arun Kumar, and released them on bail while it heard their appeal. Its reasoning went back to the story the soldiers had told in 2010. “There was absolutely no justification for a civilian to be present at such a forward formation near LoC, that too during the night when the infiltration from across the border was high,” the tribunal said. That the dead had been “militants” who had infiltrated across the border could not be ruled out, it reasoned, “because they were wearing ‘pathan suits’ which are worn by terrorists”.

The tribunal also observed that the soldiers had been dismissed and jailed “allegedly under pressure from the then National Conference government”, that the army’s investigation had “failed” to establish the chain of evidence on which the court martial relied, and that the families had delayed their complaint to win sympathy. The Pathan suit is everyday dress across the Valley, and the families said their sons had left home in trousers, shirts and sweaters. The state government of the time, led by Mehbooba Mufti, considered challenging the order in a higher court but did not do so.

The families’ words

In Nadihal the families had no warning of the order. “It feels like our sons have been murdered again today,” said Riyaz’s mother, Naseema. Shahzad’s widow, Jabina Akhtar, who was raising their son on labouring wages, said: “If the government cannot give us justice, it should hang us.” She asked why, if Afzal Guru could be hanged, these officers could not. Riyaz’s brother Aijaz called the order “betrayal in the name of justice. It was the same court that sentenced these men and now it has released them.”

“They were mazdoors, how could they become militants in two days?” Mohammad Yousuf Lone asked, using the word for labourers. Naseema feared for the case against the two civilians: “The army men got bail, what if he gets bail tomorrow?” The government had promised the families jobs; seven years later, Jabina and Naseema said, none had been given. “Those locals who lured our sons and got them killed have the power and the money. We aren’t safe now,” said Shahzad’s mother, Asha Begum.

Where the appeal stands

The appeal dragged on. In December 2019 Kashmir Observer reported that hearings had not taken place because the bench had not assembled, and that the tribunal had re-listed the case for 10 January 2020. In November 2023, when the same tribunal granted bail to Captain Bhoopendra Singh, the officer convicted over the Amshipora killings of 2020, a Kashmir Times editorial cited Machil as the earlier precedent and recorded no later ruling in the case. When this article was reviewed, no final judgment of the tribunal on the appeal had been reported, and no report showed any of the five back in prison.

What Machil shows

Machil laid bare the economy behind staged encounters in Indian-occupied Kashmir. A dead “infiltrator” was worth a cash reward and promotion to the soldiers who produced him, and cash and liquor to the men who supplied the victims; three young labourers could be bought for fifty thousand rupees each and delivered to the border for the purpose. The pattern had been exposed before, at Pathribal in 2000, where the army also presented local civilians it had killed as foreign fighters.

It also showed the limits of the remedy. The case reached a verdict only because the local police moved fast, the evidence was overwhelming and the Valley was in revolt. Even then the army kept the trial in its own hands, and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act bars the prosecution of soldiers in a civilian court without New Delhi’s permission. In 2012 the Indian government admitted that it had granted no such permission in any case referred to it from Jammu and Kashmir up to 2011. The men convicted of murdering three civilians walked out of prison less than three years after the verdict. The human rights lawyer Parvez Imroz said that the tribunal’s order was “like thousands of other cases of human rights violation in Jammu and Kashmir where the culprits are released in the end”.