SRINAGAR: In a gory act, three Special Police Officers (SPOs) were on Friday abducted and subsequently murdered by gunmen in Jammu and Kashmir’s southern Shopian district, evoking widespread outrage across the country. The authorities blamed the killing of SPOs Firdous Ahmed Kuchay, Kulwant Singh and Nisar Ahmed Dhobi on Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) said that a massive manhunt is underway to capture the perpetrators dead or alive.
“I assure you those involved in this act of cowardice will be brought to justice soon,” inspector general of police (Kashmir range) S.P. Pani said. The police said that the victims were found murdered after they were kidnapped by gunmen in Shopian’s Kapran and Batagund villages early Friday.
“Their bullet riddled corpses were found in the district’s Dangam village, not very far from the places they had been kidnapped from earlier,” a police official said.
Bashir Ahmed, brother of one of the victims Nisar Ahmed said, “They (gunmen) had already captured two persons — Firdous Ahmed and Kulwant Singh — from Batagund (a neighbouring village). Then they came here (Kapran) and asked my brother Nisar Ahmed to come along. He was performing wudu (ritual washing performed in preparation for prayer). They allowed him to do it.”
The villagers chased the militants but they fired their AK 47 rifles in the air to scare them away. “They told us that they will set them free after taking their videos,” Ahmed said. The gunmen along with the abductees crossed a mountain stream and disappeared, the villagers said. “After some time we heard gunshots and we thought the Army has opened fire but later we came to know that all the three have been shot dead,” Ahmed said.
The villagers said that the gunmen have captured a fourth SPO also but they persuaded them to release him unharmed. The police said that preliminary investigation revealed the “complicity of proscribed terror outfits Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and LeT in this barbaric act of terror”. Both the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and the LeT are, so far, silent on the incident.
