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Jan Commission report casts no light on Shopian deaths

Praveen Swami

Police investigators have made no greater headway than Justice Jan
No coherent account of what happened to victims on May 29 night

NEW DELHI: Eight weeks after three separate teams of police detectives and a retired High Court judge began investigating the alleged rape and murder of two south Kashmir women, no progress has been made in identifying who the perpetrators might have been.

Media reports from Srinagar have suggested that the Justice Muzaffar Jan Commission raised suspicions that members of the families of the two Shopian women, claimed to have been raped and murdered in May, might have been involved in their deaths.

On Sunday, the judge was compelled to disassociate himself from the text purported to be present in his report. He speculated that elements of reports from police investigators attached to the Commission may have been inadvertently included.

In fact, Justice Jan specifically excluded the prospect that the “gruesome crime was committed out of jealousy, family feud or personal vengeance towards [the] bereaved family.”

But Justice Jan, police investigators attached to his Commission, a separate Jammu and Kashmir Police Special Investigation Team and the Shopian district police have all proved unable to provide a coherent account of what happened to the victims on the night of May 29.

No blame on victims’ kin

Even a cursory reading of Justice Jan’s five-section report makes clear that the claims attributed to the judge in some newspapers do not exist in his report.

“Viewed from all angles,” he recorded on pages 74-75 of the first volume of the report, “it does not seem that there are pointers to identify any circumstance by which it could be inferred that the murder of two girls is out of past enmity, revenge, family feud, village feud, or history of indifference [sic.] with any person.”

Justice Jan concluded that the two women were “raped, and in order to destroy evidence to escape the legal consequences of their inhuman act, both girls were murdered.”

He surmised that the police might have wilfully botched the investigation to gloss over the involvement of unidentified official agencies.

Despite Justice Jan’s speculative suggestion, the truth about the tragedy remains opaque. Doctors who conducted autopsies returned a finding of sexual assault in only one case. Even this finding was premised on conjecture rather than a scientific determination.

Confusing testimony

Part of the reason the Commission made so little progress towards identifying the truth was the absence of credible witnesses.

Shopkeeper Ghulam Mohiuddin Lone claimed to have heard women’s voices crying for help from inside a police truck parked on the bridge across the Rambiara river, a little after 8 p.m. on May 29. Police personnel on the bridge, Mr. Lone said, first beat him up, and then threatened to kill him if he spoke about the incident.

Radio repairman Abdul Rashid, who was with Mr. Lone, also claimed to have heard women crying for help. Like Mr. Lone, Mr. Rashid said police officers shooed him away as he approached the truck.

But Mr. Rashid’s testimony differed from Mr. Lone’s account on several counts. For example, he denied having been beaten up or threatened by the police. Moreover, Mr. Lone admitted he had told neither friends nor family about the incident. “I did not suspect that the girls would be molested,” the Commission records him as saying, “[otherwise] I would have turned back to Shopian and informed everybody.”

The husband of one of the victims began searching for her along the river and road linking Shopian to his orchards around 7.30 p.m. Neither he nor his brother, however, reported seeing the police truck on the bridge.

Another alleged eyewitness also flatly denied having seen anything.

Husband’s claim

The husband further complicated matters by reportedly claiming that his wife had called him shortly before her death, to say she was being stalked by Central Reserve Police Force personnel. Later, though, he insisted he had never made such a claim to the media and accepted police assertions that his wife neither possessed a phone, nor did she call him.

Shaukat Dalal, who participated in the search for the two women, claimed that the body of one victim lay naked in the stream. Her wrists, he said, had been tied with a rope; there was froth emanating from her nose, a sign of drowning. Doctors who examined the body, however, found no rope-mark injuries or froth, and recorded that both victims were properly clothed.

Narco tests

Frustrated by these contradictory accounts, Justice Jan took the unusual step of asking the police to carry out narco-analytic tests on some eyewitnesses, a demand judicial inquiries do not have the authority to make.

Police investigators have made no greater headway than Justice Jan. Investigators attached to the Commission demonstrated considerable interest in the sources of income of one of the victims’ husband and possible conflicts between him and his spouse. They also speculated that the victims might have had a sexual relationship which led the man to murder his sister and wife.

Like all other versions of the Shopian deaths, this too had no evidence to support it.

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