The Jammu and Kashmir government on Thursday sacked two doctors who had conducted the autopsies on two purported victims of the 2009 “Shopian rape and murder”, 14 years after the CBI had accused them of fudging evidence to establish rape and murder.
Kashmir had witnessed six weeks of unrest in 2009 after the bodies of two local women, Asiya and her sister-in-law Neelofar, were recovered from a stream in Shopian. Residents had accused the security forces of raping and murdering them.
Under pressure, the Omar Abdullah government had ordered an inquiry by a former judge, whose report led to the arrest of five policemen, and registered a case of rape and murder. But a CBI investigation later the same year claimed the two women were never raped or murdered and had died by drowning.
Thursday’s government action prompted many Kashmiris to ask why Dr Bilal Ahmad Dalal and Dr Nighat Shaheen Chilloo were being sacked now — 14 years after the CBI had indicted them.
An official said that Dr Bilal and Dr Nighat had been sacked on the charge of “actively working” with Pakistan’s assets in Kashmir to falsify the post-mortem reports. He said the women had “unfortunately died due to accidental drowning on May 29, 2009”.
According to a police dossier, Dr Nighat has been a key player in “the adversary’s (Pakistan’s)” campaign “to shape the narrative in its favour” in Jammu and Kashmir, “even if it meant creating and propagating false and distorted accounts of incidents and events”.
