New Delhi: That night, workers were finishing work on cleaning up the Taj Mahal, and forest guards were rustling up the tigers that visiting US President Bill Clinton would see. In Kashmir, Lashkar-e-Taiba cadres were walking through the orchards and rice fields that surround Chittisinghpora, preparing to line up 35 villagers, and execute them at point-blank range. A plaque on a crumbling white wall commemorates the 20 March 2000 massacre, the largest of the many mass killings of civilians that have marked the course of the long jihad in Kashmir: “Killed by unkowns,” it reads. Each bullet hole carefully has been circled in yellow paint to distinguish them from the damage caused by weather and time.
As India mourns the slaughter of 26 tourists at the Basiran meadow—the largest mass killing since Chittisinghpora—the forgotten tragedy holds important lessons. Like in 2000, political leaders have vowed to track down and punish the perpetrators, but botched investigations meant critical questions about what happened and why have never been resolved.
Two of the terrorists held on charges of being responsible for the massacre were escorted across the border into Pakistan in 2015 after being acquitted of all charges by a Delhi court. Muzammil Bhat, the Lashkar jihadist believed to have led the killing team, went on to train the men who carried out the 26/11 carnage in Mumbai, according to the testimony of incarcerated perpetrator David Headley.
Five villagers kidnapped from the nearby mountains, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) later alleged, were shot dead in a staged encounter by troops of the 7 Rashtriya Rifles and passed off as Lashkar terrorists. The CBI also alleged the Army was involved in both fabricating evidence and seeking to manipulate the findings of DNA tests.
The government denied sanction to prosecute the accused officers in a civilian court; however, the Indian Army later shut down internal legal proceedings, claiming there was inadequate evidence.
A crime without witnesses
From the outset, police investigators handling the Chittisinghpora case faced a critical problem: There were no real witnesses. The killers had arrived in combat fatigues, many of their faces masked. Local residents initially assumed they were troops of the 7 Rashtriya Rifles searching for terrorists. The terrorists themselves had gone to some lengths to strengthen that impression, with some dabbing their faces in Holi colours and one conspicuously drinking from a bottle of rum.
Two groups of men were linked up, one outside the Singh Sabha Sumandri Hall Gurdwara and another at the Shaukeen Mohalla Gurdwara, a hundred metres or so down the road. The two groups were asked to produce identification. Few thought anything unusual was happening.
Arvind Singh, who was watching television at home when the men in uniform arrived and survived because he did not leave his house, thought it was a routine counter-terrorism sweep. “Terrorists used to come to the village regularly,” he said at the time. “The Army used to patrol the village but had never carried out searches or interrogations. So the terrorists often used to stay here.”
Less than three weeks before the killings, a Lashkar unit, also dressed in combat fatigues, had spent an entire afternoon watching children play cricket in the village. This time, though, things were different. Nanak Singh, one of two survivors, later told journalists he sensed “a murderous frenzy in the actions of the gunmen.” “I murmured into the ear of my neighbour Charan Singh, standing by my right, that we were going to die today,” he recalled.
Residents, the police in Anantnag later claimed, identified Mohammad Yakub Magray as one of the perpetrators. Although Magray was questioned and held several times under Jammu and Kashmir’s controversial Public Safety Act, he was never charged or prosecuted for the Chittisinghpora killings.
The witnesses in the village, though, insisted that the darkness made it impossible to recognise any of the perpetrators.
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The missing links
Even as large-scale protests broke out across Kashmir over the staged killings of the five villagers by the Army, police in Srinagar claimed to have made progress in the massacre investigation. Two Pakistani nationals—Muhammad Suhail Malik of Sialkot and Wasim Ahmad of Gujranwala—were arrested by the police’s Special Operations Group and charged with having participated in the killings at Chittisinghpora. Malik was alleged to have infiltrated across the Line of Control (LoC) in 1999 and participated in two attacks on the army.
Facing journalists while still in custody, Malik admitted to having participated in the killings in Chittisinghpora. “I fired, but I don’t know if I killed anyone,” he told one reporter. “I suppose I did. I don’t know.” “We were told what to do and not why,” Malik added. “Afterward, we were told not to talk about it.”
Later, the American journalist Barry Bearak was able to confirm many of the details Malik had offered to journalists. A nephew to Lashkar chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, Malik dropped out of school after the fifth grade. The younger of the two sons of Anwar Malik, who owned a grocery store in Sialkot, Malik drifted between Lahore and Sialkot for some years, eventually joining the Lashkar’s seminary at Muridke near Lahore. His older brother, meanwhile, found a job in Saudi Arabia.
Anwar Malik admitted his son had gone to wage jihad in Kashmir, Bearak reported. The grocery store owner, though, denied knowing which group Malik had joined—even though the home had several glossy Lashkar decals.
Little evidence, though, emerged in court to support the police account. The survivor Nanak Singh and Chittisinghpora residents Gurmakh Singh and Karamjeet Singh, produced by the police as eyewitnesses, declined to identify the alleged killers in court. Two other witnesses, Bilal Ahmad and Ulfat Jan, to whom police said the Pakistanis had confessed their guilt, were never produced in court.
The weapons alleged to have been used in the Chittisinghpora killings were claimed to have been dumped in the Litter River before Malik and Ahmad fled to Aligarh, where they were alleged to have lived with the family of an ethnic-Kashmiri supporter. The weapons were never found, ruling out ballistic tests to link them to the empty shell cases found in Chittisinghpora.
“As there is no incriminating material on record against the accused persons, both the accused persons are hereby acquitted,” trial judge Kaveri Baweja ruled in 2011.
The return home
Like dozens of other Pakistani terrorists held in 1988, Malik and Ahmad would have expected to spend their lives in an Indian prison. For years, Pakistan had refused to acknowledge that terrorism-related prisoners held in India were its nationals. For its part, India rarely informed Pakistan of the arrests of its nationals and denied Islamabad diplomatic access to them. Thus, hundreds of prisoners—some held on minor charges—remained in jail even though they had been acquitted or completed their sentences.
Then, in 2003, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf initiated a secret dialogue, which led to a ceasefire on the LoC and a commitment to end cross-border terrorism. The dialogue also opened a path to home for Pakistani prisoners, one of a series of confidence-building measures between the two countries.
From 2004 to 2016, when the prisoner-repatriation programme was suspended, 168 Pakistani nationals held in Jammu and Kashmir for offences unrelated to terrorism—like crossing the LoC to visit family—were sent home. The authorities also returned 137 alleged terrorists.
Late in 2015, both the alleged Chittisinghpora killers were sent home through the Wagah border under the supervision of Pakistani diplomats. Their whereabouts are unknown.
The other prisoners who returned to Pakistan included Nasrullah Mansoor Langrial, the co-founder of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami and a close associate of Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar Alvi. Langrial was not convicted of any terrorism-related charges, though, and was returned home to Gujaranwala in 2011. Following his return to Pakistan, he married and disappeared from public view.
For the most part, the released terrorists had been convicted only on immigration-related charges, but not of violent crimes. Raja Kifyat Ali, held in June 2010, allegedly in possession of a bag full of ammunition, was acquitted by a trial court in Srinagar and repatriated home the following year. Shahnawaz Malik, arrested near the LoC in Handwara in September 1998 after an encounter with the Indian Army, served 10 years in prison before being repatriated.
Karachi resident Tanvir Ahmad Tanavali, among the last to be repatriated, spent 10 years after being arrested while crossing the LoC in November 2009. He was sentenced to six years in prison and a fine of Rs 1,000.
The villagers of Chittisinghpora continue to insist they do not know who the killers are. “They’re debating whether it is for the greater good of the village to lie to you,” a visiting journalist’s translator whispered in his ear soon after the massacre, “and if so, what are the right lies to tell.”
“It is a matter of survival.”
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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