An arrest in Kashmiri lawyer’s murder leads to more unanswered questions
An influential separatist voice, Mian Abdul Qayoom, has been held in the case, which now seems enmeshed in the complex politics of the Valley.
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Nearly four years ago, suspected militants gunned down 40-year-old Babar Qadri, an outspoken lawyer and television panellist, inside his home in Srinagar.
No militant outfit owned up to the killing. In May 2021, the police filed a chargesheet against the six accused in the case including a district commander of ‘The Resistance Front,’ an allegedly rebranded version of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.
The lawyer’s family members were not convinced. They demanded an investigation into the killing by an agency other than the Jammu and Kashmir police.
Their misgivings were apparently shared by the Srinagar court where the case was tried. The court let off two of the accused on bail as the police failed to bring any evidence against them. It also transferred the case to Jammu and Kashmir police’s special wing State Investigation Agency.
Qadri’s assassination has been compared to the killing of journalist Shujaat Bukhari in 2018. The police originally blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba militants for Bukhari’s murder and claimed to have killed them in a gunfight. But, the journalist’s murder remains a mystery to this day, as the police failed to come up with a convincing explanation about the larger conspiracy behind his killing.
Qadri’s case, however, seemed to take a more promising turn. This...
