The Chattisinghpora, Pathribal, and Barakpora massacres refer to a series of three closely related incidents that took place in the Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir between 20 March 2000 and 3 April 2000 that left up to 49 Kashmiri civilians dead.
[3] The massacre, which took place on the eve of U.S. President Bill Clinton's visit to the Subcontinent, was widely condemned by both the Indian and Pakistani governments, as well as the leaders of the Kashmiri separatist movement.
The massacre created tension and distrust between the Sikh and Muslim residents of the area, but no problems developed at the joint Muslim-Sikh village school.
[1] In 2010, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) associate David Headley, who was arrested in connection with the 2008 Mumbai attacks, confessed to the National Investigation Agency that the LeT carried out the Chittisinghpura massacre.
[4] He is said to have identified an LeT militant named Muzzamil as part of the group which carried out the killings apparently to create communal tension just before Clinton's visit.
Idrees Khan (later Subedar) of the Indian Army killed five men in Pathribal village of Anantnag district, claiming that the victims were the "foreign militants" responsible for the attacks.
Official reports claimed that security forces had, after a gun fight, blown up the hut where the men were hiding, and had retrieved five bodies that had been charred beyond recognition.
Over the following days, local villagers began to protest, claiming that the men were ordinary civilians who had been killed in a fake encounter, not "foreign militants."
[2] On 30 March, local authorities in Anantnag relented to growing public pressure, and agreed to exhume the bodies and conduct an investigation into the deaths.
On 19 March 2012, The CBI (central Bureau of Investigation) told the Supreme Court of India that the fake encounter at Pathribal in Jammu and Kashmir 12 years ago in which seven people were killed by Army personnel "were cold-blooded murders and the accused officials deserve to be meted out exemplary punishment."
[11] The special investigation team inquiring into the Pathribal incident approached the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, and the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Kolkata, with medical samples of the relatives to match with those of the slain men.
[11] In their little village in the militancy-hit Anantnag district, the traumatised family of Zahoor Dalal waits for justice – if not from Dr Abdullah, then from the Almighty.
"I do not need DNA tests to recognise my son," Dalaal's mother Raja Bano told rediff.com "We had identified his body two years ago.
"[13] Central Forensic Science Laboratory Director V K Kashyap told the Times: 'We had dashed off a letter to the J&K government immediately after we found the samples had certain serious discrepancies.
[13] "The five the government killed were innocent," Niranjan Singh, president of the Anantnag District Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, told rediff.com on the telephone.
"It clearly shows the designs of the Farooq government," said former Union home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, People's Democratic Party leader and main rival of Dr Abdullah's National Conference.
"In any case," said Communist Party of India-Marxist legislator Yusuf Tarigami, "the basis of the protest at Barakpora was the killing of the five men at Pathribal.
The chief minister asked Justice S R Pandian of the Supreme Court, who had inquired into the Barakpora firing and found the security force personnel guilty, to study the Sikh killings, but the judge refused to do so.
On 3 April 2000, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 protesters marched to the city of Anantnag, where they intended to present a memorandum to the Deputy Commissioner demanding the exhumation of the bodies.
When they reached the town of Barakpora, three kilometres from Anantnag, the protesters began an unprovoked throwing of stones at an Indian paramilitary camp.
[14] Fresh samples were collected in April 2002, which, upon testing, conclusively proved that the victims were innocent local civilians, and not foreign militants as the Indian government had been claiming for the past two years.
In August 2000, the Indian government announced that it had captured two Pakistan-based Lashkar e Tayyiba operatives, who, in December 2000, allegedly admitted to carrying out the attacks.
In an interview with The New York Times, he stated that he had been trained in mountain climbing and marksmanship by the Lashkar, and had infiltrated into India in October 1999 carrying the equivalent of $200 for expenses.
In an introduction to a book written by Madeleine Albright titled The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs, she accused "Hindu militants" of perpetrating the act.
They acknowledged the error in an email to the Times of India:[21] Page xi of the Mighty and the Almighty contains a reference to Hindu militants that will be deleted in subsequent printings, both in America and in international editions.
[21] In the hours immediately after the massacre in March 2000, the US condemned the killings but refused to accept the Indian government's contention that it was the work of Pakistani Islamist groups.