# The 2010 uprising and the killing of protesters

**URL:** https://kashmirhope.com/t/the-2010-uprising-and-the-killing-of-protesters/158
**Category:** Atrocities and massacres
**Created:** [January 1, 2026, 2:09am UTC](https://kashmirhope.com/t/the-2010-uprising-and-the-killing-of-protesters/158 "2026-01-01T02:09:00Z")
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#### Post date: [October 3, 2026, 5:55pm UTC](https://kashmirhope.com/t/the-2010-uprising-and-the-killing-of-protesters/158/1 "2026-10-03T17:55:08Z")

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**Summer 2010 | Kashmir Valley**

Between June and September 2010 India’s Central Reserve Police Force and the Jammu and Kashmir police killed well over a hundred people in the Kashmir Valley, most of them teenagers and young men protesting against Indian rule, after a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, Tufail Mattoo, was killed by a police tear gas shell. A judicial commission later found that almost every death it examined was the result of “unprovoked and indiscriminate firing”, but its report was never published and no member of the forces has been convicted for any of the killings.

## A winter of funerals

The year began with the deaths of boys. On 8 January 2010 Inayat Ahmad Khan, seventeen, was killed in firing by India’s Central Reserve Police Force in Srinagar. On 31 January Wamiq Farooq, a seventh-class pupil of twelve or thirteen, was struck on the head by a tear gas shell fired by the police at Rajouri Kadal in the old city, and died. On 5 February Zahid Farooq, sixteen or seventeen, was shot dead by a security officer while playing with friends outside his home. Indian officials admitted that their men were responsible and said they were investigating.

The anger had older roots. Kashmiris had lived for twenty years under one of the densest military occupations in the world, the plebiscite promised by India and the United Nations had never been held, and the uprising of 2008 had ended with dozens shot dead and no one tried. At the end of May 2010 came the news that three young labourers from Nadihal in Baramulla had been lured to the Line of Control at Machil, shot by Indian soldiers and passed off as Pakistani “infiltrators”. Protests against the Machil killings were under way when the death that defined the summer took place.

## Tufail Mattoo

Tufail Ahmad Mattoo was seventeen, a twelfth-class student at the Government Higher Secondary School in Hazratbal, and he was preparing for the medical entrance examination. On 11 June 2010 his father, Mohammad Ashraf Mattoo, gave him a ten-rupee note for the bus fare to his tuition class. Near the Gani Memorial Stadium at Rajouri Kadal, some eight kilometres from the family home at Saida Kadal, he was struck on the head by a tear gas shell fired at close range by the Jammu and Kashmir police. His skull was broken open and he died on the spot, a five-rupee coin still in his right hand.

His body came back to the family from the Police Control Room. The police first called his death “mysterious”; the post-mortem showed that a tear gas shell had destroyed his skull and brain. The police registered a case, FIR 45 of 2010, only after the family went to a magistrate, a week or more after the killing. “What was Tufail’s fault?” his father asked years later. “I was angry, really angry at what they had done to my son. The police’s hands are soaked in blood.”

## A summer of killing

Tufail’s funeral became a protest, and the forces fired on the protests that followed. Each death brought a funeral, each funeral a procession, and each procession more firing. Rafiq Ahmad Bangroo, twenty-seven, was beaten by the CRPF on 12 June and died a week later. Javed Ahmad Malla, twenty-six, was killed on 20 June at a CRPF bunker which, Outlook reported, mourners returning from Bangroo’s burial had attacked. In Sopore the CRPF shot dead Shakeel Ganai, seventeen, and Firdous Khan, eighteen, on 25 June, and Bilal Ahmed Wani, twenty-two, two days later. On 28 June Tajamul Bashir, twenty, was killed at Delina and Tauqeer Rather, nine, at Sopore. At Anchedora near Anantnag police firing killed Ishtiyaq Ahmad Khanday, fifteen, Imtiyaz Ahmad Itoo, seventeen, and Shujaat-ul-Islam, seventeen.

The killing went on through July, August and September. Sameer Ahmad Rah, a schoolboy from Batamaloo in Srinagar, seven years old by the Koul commission’s account and nine by Kashmir Life’s, died on 2 August after being brutalised by the forces; the police said that he had died in a “public stampede”. Meelad Ahmad Dar, nine, of Ganderbal, Asif Hussain Rather, ten, of Delina and Adil Ramzan Sheikh, twelve, of Palhallan were also among the dead. Omar Qayoom, seventeen, was beaten by policemen of the Soura police station and CRPF men on 8 August, his father told the Koul commission, and died of his injuries at the SKIMS hospital on 25 August. Five women were killed, Afroza Jan, Aisha Begum, Fancy Jan, Hajra Begum and Mubeena Akhtar, and so was Habibullah Khan, sixty, of Dewar Lolab. Kashmir Life counted about a hundred of the dead under the age of thirty.

The forces said they fired in self-defence against violent crowds. At Palhalan on 18 September the police fired on protesters blocking a highway and killed two young men. “We now have two people who are dead, we were forced to open fire because of the violence,” a police spokesman said. Residents said the protest had been peaceful. “They didn’t even try to disperse the protest with tear gas or a baton charge. They fired directly without any provocation,” said one of them, Ghulam Ahmed Tantray.

## Curfew and the worst day

Through the summer the authorities answered with curfew. Srinagar and the other towns of the Valley were locked down for days and weeks at a time, and on 17 September the army itself was deployed to control crowds.

The worst single day was 13 September, in the days of Eid at the end of Ramadan. Reports that copies of the Quran had been desecrated in the United States, carried by Iran’s Press TV and shown on Indian television, brought crowds out in defiance of a 24-hour curfew. At Tangmarg, where a crowd set fire to an empty school run by Christian missionaries, three protesters and a policeman were killed in the clashes with the police that followed, and protesters were also killed at Humhama in Budgam district and elsewhere. The Christian Science Monitor counted at least thirteen protesters killed that day.

## Arrests and detention

Alongside the bullets came arrests. When the protests ended, Kashmir Life reported, the police rounded up 4,294 people, and about two hundred of them, seven government employees and two minors among them, were detained under the Public Safety Act, the law that allows detention without trial. Human Rights Watch reported that children held for taking part in the protests were jailed with adults, in violation of juvenile justice laws.

By August 2014, according to the chief minister, Omar Abdullah, the state government had registered cases against 6,563 people over the protests and had withdrawn charges against 1,811 of them under an amnesty. Families of young men still wanted by the police said the amnesty meant little. “Police officers at the local level run their own governments and they totally negate any amnesty to the protesting youth,” one father, Mohammad Subhan, told Kashmir Life.

## New Delhi’s answer

On 13 September the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said he was willing to talk with groups that renounced violence, and his security cabinet discussed lifting the Armed Forces Special Powers Act from parts of Kashmir. It was not lifted. An all-party delegation of Indian parliamentarians then visited the Valley, and the central government announced the release of students, the reopening of schools, a debate on demilitarisation and five lakh rupees for the family of each person killed. Kashmir Life called the payment “blood money”.

Three interlocutors were appointed: Dileep Padgaonkar, who led the panel, the academic Radha Kumar and the former official M. M. Ansari. Their mandate, Padgaonkar said, was “to try and trace contours of a political settlement”. After a year in which they met six hundred delegations across all twenty-two districts, they reported to the home minister, P. Chidambaram, in October 2011. They recommended strengthening Article 370, and said that the views they had heard on repealing the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Disturbed Areas Act were in their report. None of this was done, and in 2019 New Delhi abolished Article 370 instead.

## A father against the state

Mohammad Ashraf Mattoo gave up his work in Dubai to fight for his son. He went to court in July 2010 and, angered by the delays, to the High Court in July 2011. At the end of 2012 the police filed a report closing the case and declaring Tufail’s killers “untraceable”, without informing the family. In February 2015 the High Court ordered a fresh investigation and gave the police Crime Branch eight more weeks. In May 2015 the Crime Branch closed the case again, declaring the killers “untraced”, and its report said that Tufail had been killed by a stone, not a tear gas shell, contrary to the post-mortem. The family filed a protest petition before the Chief Judicial Magistrate, and Amnesty International, which said that two policemen had fired the shell at Tufail at close range, asked the authorities to reopen the investigation.

The case went on. By 2018 Ashraf Mattoo had attended more than fifty hearings. “Investigation in Kashmir is a cruel joke; they do it to hush-up the case,” he said, and for that reason he had rejected the Koul commission’s recommendation that the Central Bureau of Investigation take up the killing. In February 2020 a city court in Srinagar adjourned the hearing because the family’s lawyer, Mian Abdul Qayoom, president of the High Court Bar Association, was himself in detention. “My son will complete ten years in the grave. He has not got justice so far. But I am undeterred. I will fight,” Ashraf Mattoo told Kashmir Reader that June. “If I do not get justice, Allah will deliver it in the afterlife. But my struggle will expose the system that is bereft of any respect for justice.”

## One case in court

One killing of that year did bring policemen to trial. An Assistant Sub-Inspector, Abdul Khaliq Sofi, and Mohammad Akram, a special police officer in Kashmir Life’s report and a constable in others, were charged in Wamiq Farooq’s death, not with murder but with culpable homicide not amounting to murder. They surrendered on 1 December 2015, nearly six years after the killing, and were sent to the Central Jail in Srinagar. “I have been fighting for justice for more than five years. Finally my stand has been vindicated,” said Wamiq’s father, Farooq Ahmad Wani. His lawyer, Aijaz Ahmad Dar, said the case should “pave the way for the reopening of several cases related to the killing of more than 100 civilians during the 2010 unrest”. It did not. Within weeks the Muslim Deeni Mahaz complained that “continuous efforts to get them bailed” showed the trial to be “a mere eyewash”, and no verdict had been reported when this article was reviewed.

At Anchedora the district magistrate ordered a magisterial inquiry into the killing of the three boys there. According to sources quoted by Kashmir Life, it held a senior superintendent of police and four of his subordinates responsible for “lapses in the three killings”. The report was left in the state home department, which answered directly to the chief minister; the superintendent was promoted to deputy inspector general, and the other senior officers were promoted or given posts after retirement.

## The Koul commission

In 2014, four years after the killings and after his party’s electoral defeat, Omar Abdullah announced an inquiry into 125 killings of 2010. Kashmir Life described it as the reopening of wounds for political ends. The retired judge M. L. Koul began work in August 2014 with two clerks and a peon, and the floods of September 2014 destroyed his early records. Only sixty-three families came forward.

Koul submitted a report of 320 pages to the chief minister, Mehbooba Mufti, in December 2016. Of the sixty-three cases before him, only two concerned deaths caused by stone-throwing; the rest, he found, were the result of “unprovoked and indiscriminate firing and use of disproportionate force”. In one case he called the defence’s statement “only a cover-up mechanism”; in another he called its evidence a “false and concocted mess of lies”. He found that Sameer Ahmad Rah had been “brutalized by the security forces and died as a result thereof”, that two police officials had killed Wamiq Farooq “in unprovoked firing”, that a murder case should be registered against the policemen in Omar Qayoom’s death, and that the Mattoo case should go to the Central Bureau of Investigation. He held fifty-three families entitled to ten lakh rupees each, less the five lakh already paid, and every petitioning family to a job for one member, told the government to stop deploying the Central Reserve Police Force against protesters, and asked it to consider whether the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Disturbed Areas Act were still needed.

The report was never made public. Its findings are known only from Kashmiri press accounts of the document, and no government is known to have acted on them.

## What the summer left

Kashmiri counts put the dead of 2010 at 120 to 125, and Al Jazeera at 123. The official count from May to 21 September was about 110 dead and 537 civilians injured, most of them by the forces’ firing; the police and the CRPF reported about four thousand of their own men injured in the same period. The dead were almost all on one side, killed by bullets, shells and beatings, and most were teenagers and young men who had come out with stones, not guns.

The uprising of 2010 was carried by a generation that had grown up among soldiers, bunkers and checkpoints. The state answered it with live ammunition and, from that summer, with pellet-firing shotguns presented as a less lethal weapon, which would blind hundreds in 2016. When this article was reviewed, not one of the more than a hundred deaths had led to a conviction. For the Mattoo family the record of 2010 is an unpublished report and a case file marked untraced.

## About the evidence

Kashmiri counts and later reports put the dead at 120 to 125, among them 123 in Al Jazeera’s figure; the official count was about 110 between May and 21 September 2010. The post-mortem established that Tufail Mattoo was killed by a tear gas shell, although a police Crime Branch closure report of 2015 attributed his death to a stone. The findings of the Koul commission come from Kashmiri press reports of a document that the government has never published.

[Read this article in the library](https://kashmirhope.com/library/events/protests2010/).