By News Agency of Kashmir
Srinagar: Asking the whereabouts of their kins, a group of about thirty five members including the relatives of persons who have ‘disappeared during insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir’ held protest demonstrations out side the park, where UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi was addressing a gathering.
Carrying banners and photographs of their missing relatives, nearly 35 members of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons APDP protested, demanding immediate tracing of their dear ones. “Tell us whether they’re dead or alive,” one of the members questioned and said
The group, set up in 1994, has been pressing for the creation of an independent commission to investigate thousands of disappearances in the state since a separatist insurgency began in 1989.
“Where is my husband ‘Sonia Ji” you have come to meet women in Kashmir but who will return father to children, sons to mother and husband to a wife”, one of the women Shahzad questioned and said that what about the women whose son, brothers and husbands are missing?
According to the estimates by local HR activists ten thousands people have disappearances during the last one and a half decade in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The government says most of the people who disappeared are Kashmiri youth and have crossed over to neighboring country Pakistan for weapons training.
Local activists and Kashmiris have complained for years that innocent people have been killed by security forces in staged gun battles and that suspected rebels have been taken away by authorities and never heard of again