A high-level Court of Inquiry (CoI) has been initiated into the July 18 Shopian encounter in south Kashmir in which three alleged militants were killed, according to the Army on Tuesday.
“A high-level CoI into the Operation Amshipora, Shopian, is under progress. Statements of key witnesses are being recorded and progress is being monitored closely,” an Army spokesman said.
The encounter came under a cloud after three families from the Pir Panjal valley’s Rajouri district claimed that the three killed were their kin and were labourers by profession.
“Additional civil witnesses are being asked to depose before the CoI. Concurrently, DNA samples have been collected from Rajouri under the aegis of the J&K police and sent for matching with the terrorists killed on July 18, 2020,” the Army said.
The spokesman said the Army was “committed to ethical conduct of all counter terrorist operations”. “Cases where doubts are raised are investigated under due process as per the law of the land. Since the case is under investigation, further details will be shared periodically, as appropriate without affecting due legal process.”
The DNA samples of the families were lifted on August 13 and have been sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) for examination and comparison with the “three unidentified slain militants”.
The families have identified the missing youth as Abrar Ahmed Khan, 18, Imtiyaz Hussain, 26, and Abrar, 21, all from Rajouri, and claimed the faces resembled the pictures of the slain ‘militants’.
They claimed that all the three were carrying Aadhaar cards when they left home in June but the security forces said the three could not be identified immediately.