guardian.co.uk, Wednesday February 20 2008
A Kashmiri boy walks in a graveyard in Srinagar, India. Photograph: Mukhtar Khan/AP
More than 330 people have died while in police custody in Indian-controlled Kashmir over the past 18 years, official figures revealed today.
A police investigation found a further 111 people had disappeared from cells with no further information on what had happened to them.
Human rights groups believe government forces could be behind far more disappearances, claiming up to 10,000 people have gone missing since 1989.
India has an estimated 700,000 soldiers stationed in the disputed Himalayan region in an effort to combat groups fighting for independence.
The Jammu-Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society said today the police figures were likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
The group said 178 Kashmiris had died in police custody in the past five years alone. A further 239 had disappeared after being taken by government forces.
Pervez Imroz, a spokesman for the coalition, said: "It's anybody's guess how brutal security apparatus with a sweeping policy of catch and kill would have been in early 90s."
Indian forces have been fighting nearly a dozen separate rebel groups in Kashmir since the outbreak of an Islamist insurgency in 1989.
Factions include militants who support the fight for Kashmir's independence from India and those who support its merger with a Muslim-majority Pakistan.
Police and rebel groups have been accused of human rights violations against civilians living in the territory. More than 40,000 people have been killed since the fighting began.
Imroz claimed police in Kashmir regularly killed innocent people and said up to 10,000 people had disappeared after being detained by government forces.
Police officials stood by their figures however, and said any human rights abuses were properly investigated.
"We believe in facts and figures, and whenever allegations have been found true, action has been taken," said Kuldeep Khoda, the state police chief.
Last year, authorities charged seven policemen with the murder of five civilians whom they allegedly attempted to pass off as militants and claim substantial rewards.
The charges were the first to be brought against policemen since the start of the insurgency.
The disputed region of Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan. The countries have fought two wars over control of the territory since they gained independence from Britain in 1947.
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Police in Indian-administered Kashmir have rejected a demand for the identification of up to 1,000 bodies, said to be buried in unmarked graves.
A Kashmir-based rights group has found the mass graves, which it alleges could contain the remains of civilians who went missing after their arrest. The Indian army and militants have been accused of numerous human rights abuses in Kashmir in the past two decades.
The Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) has identified a dozen villages in the area around Uri, near the Line of Control that divides Kashmir, where it says nearly 1,000 unidentified people have been buried. It has demanded that the bodies are identified.
The villagers told they have no idea who they were and that the police told them the men were foreign militants killed in fighting with the Indian troops. According to the villagers, the bodies were either charred, or their faces were mutilated beyond recognition. But they say the first two bodies exhumed within weeks of their burial were of two civilians allegedly killed in police custody in Srinagar. The police officer accused of killing them has since absconded. Last year, police in other parts of Kashmir exhumed at least five bodies of civilians alleged to have died in extra-judicial killings who the authorities said were foreign militants.
A prominent human rights activist and advisor to the APDP, Pervez Imroz, stated the Indian security forces have used the presence of foreign militants as a way of covering up custodial killings.
He said the government should come clean on the issue, by allowing an investigation by the International Commission on Disappeared Persons. However, the inspector general of police in the Kashmir valley, SM Sahai, has dismissed the demand, saying the police have investigated all cases of disappearances reported to it and have registered cases for investigation wherever necessary.
The APDP says more than 8,000 people have disappeared in Kashmir in the past two decades. The government has given conflicting figures, ranging from 3,700 to 111.
World community must take strict notice of the human rights violation inside Kashmir by Indian security forces.
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