Three years after the Chittisinghpora controversy and only the second time in 14 years of turmoil in the state, bodies of civilians branded militants and killed and buried by security forces were exhumed today following allegations of a fake encounter.Soon after, an Army spokesman admitted that both the dead were civilians and claimed they had died in an exchange of fire between militants and security forces. They had buried the deceased as no one at the encounter site could identify them, he added.The exhumation followed an order by Udhampur Deputy Commissioner Ashok Parmar to hold a magisterial inquiry into the death of the two men, killed in a joint operation by the police, BSF and the Army five days ago. Parmar took action after widespread protests by the local people at Gool calling the encounter fake.A team led by Assistant Commissioner Abdul Hafiz reached the town, in Udhampur district, yesterday and the bodies were exhumed by police in his presence.The deceased were identified as Abdul Majid and Abdul Karim, both residents of Gool, by the local people who had gathered there in large numbers. While Majid’s brother along with some relatives had come to take his body home, no one from Karim’s family was present. His body was taken home by some villagers.The Army, however, claims the decision to exhume was theirs. ‘‘The moment we came to know the deceased were residents of a nearby village, we exhumed their bodies and handed them over to their relatives,’’ said the spokesperson today evening. According to the police statement released soon after the incident, they had gunned down three militants at Deeda (Gool) in Udhampur district after a hot chase from nearby Arnas. It had even lodged an FIR with the Mahore police station in this regard.The villagers have also questioned why the FIR was registered at Mahore police station and not Gool. The demand to shift the case has been accepted by DIG (Udhampur-Doda range) Satvir Gupta.In the 2000 Chittisinghpora case too, it was the pressure put by locals that had led to the exhumation of bodies. Police had killed and buried six people at Pathribal claiming they were the militants behind the massacre of 35 Sikhs at Chittisinghpora. After widespread protests, the then state government headed by Farooq Abdullah had ordered a probe and DNA testing of the bodies.However, in another cover-up, the DNA samples sent to Hyderabad for testing were found to have been tampered with, and the doctors who had collected the same were suspended.When the samples were later again sent for testing, the results showed the six deceased were local civilians.It was only last year, after the Mufti Mohammed Sayeed government came to power, that the then in-charge of Anantnag district, SSP Farooq Khan, was suspended on the charge of fudging the DNA samples.
