The state investigation agency has named jailed Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front chief Yasin Malik and four others, including three long-deceased militants, in the murder of 27-year-old Kashmiri Pandit nurse Sarla Bhat, more than three decades after she was killed in Srinagar.
Sarla, a resident of Anantnag who worked in Srinagar’s SKIMS hospital, was abducted and killed in April 1990 at the peak of militancy. The militants had stepped up attacks on Pandits after then governor Jagmohan’s hardline campaign left scores of civilians dead.
Bhat’s case is one of the many reopened by the state investigation agency — the SIA — in 2023, apparently to placate Pandits. The agency comes under the jurisdiction of the police, controlled by the lieutenant governor.
Malik is facing life imprisonment in the 2016 “terror funding case”. He was arrested after leading the 2016 summer unrest, along with other separatist leaders like Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The other four militants chargesheeted includes Malik’s key associate Abdul Hamid Sheikh, who was killed by security forces in 1992. The two, along with some others, had started armed militancy here.
The SIA, in a statement, called the chargesheet a “landmark development and a defining moment in Jammu and Kashmir’s fight against terrorism”.
The agency has filed a “737-page comprehensive chargesheet before the court of the additional sessions judge, TADA/POTA, special judge designated under the NIA Act, Srinagar, in the abduction, torture and brutal killing” of the nurse.
“The filing of the chargesheet after nearly 35 years marks a historic milestone in the pursuit of justice for victims of terrorism and stands as one of the most significant breakthroughs in the investigation of legacy terror crimes in Jammu and Kashmir. More importantly, the chargesheet sends a powerful and unequivocal message that time can never become a shield for terrorism,” it reads.
‘The Pandits have in the past claimed that the nurse was sexually assaulted before she was murdered but the statement is silent on that charge.