A prominent human rights group in Kashmir has asked Chief Minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed to announce a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) headed by two Supreme Court judges to investigate the issue of enforced disappearance of people and presence of unmarked and mass graves in Jammu & Kashmir.
The separatists and rights groups in Kashmir allege that more than 8,000 people have disappeared in custody. The authorities dismiss the allegations saying most of the people regarded as missing might have crossed the border to get arms training.
The rights groups suspect that the missing people were likely to have been interred in the unmarked and mass graves found at various placed in the embattled region. On Thursday, Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), wrote to Sayeed and demanded time-bound CoI assisted by international experts on enforced disappearances.
The APDP claims it found more than 940 unknown, unmarked and mass graves in Uri area of Baramulla district of North Kashmir seven years ago. It claims that the group, in collaboration with another rights body, published a report titled “buried evidence” in 2009 that documented 2,700 unknown, unmarked, and mass graves, containing 2,943 bodies, out of which 2,373 were in unmarked graves, and 177 graves contained two or more bodies. These findings were based on verifying 62 sites in North Kashmir.