In October, a Srinagar court ordered formation of a special investigation team to probe a previous special investigation team that failed to establish the truth about the 1996 police killing of daily wager Mohammad Ramzan Bhat in Jammu and Kashmir’s capital. Despite post-mortem findings, human rights commission reports that said Bhat’s was an extrajudicial killing, Jameela Bano had to knock on the door of the judiciary for over two decades.

When the families of three men killed by security forces in the Hyderpora area of Srinagar on 15 November called the killing “cold-blooded murder”, Srinagar resident Jameela Banoo, 50, was overcome by grief.

The widow of Mohammad Ramzan Bhat, supposedly killed in a firefight in Kashmir in 1996, more than 25 years ago, Jameela had been elated just two weeks earlier when a Srinagar court pronounced her slain husband innocent, and the encounter—to quote the order—“fake”. She had won a decades-long struggle for vindication, but it was apparent now that Kashmir’s long history of innocent civilians being killed was far from over.

“Khoon chue barev dewan (blood leaves a trail),” Jameela, a mother of three, told Article 14 about why she fought so long to clear her husband’s name. “I had promised my late husband that I will fight till I am alive to prove his innocence.”

In Kashmir’s most recent encounter, authorities said two militants and two associates were killed on 15 November in a gun battle in the main city of Srinagar after police received a tip-off about their presence in a shopping centre. Three of the slain men’s families refuted this claim, saying the men had been used as “human shields.”

Under a new government policy to prevent gatherings at funerals of slain militants in Jammu & Kashmir, authorities refused to hand over the men’s bodies to their families, and instead buried them in a graveyard 80 km away, in Kupwara district in north Kashmir.

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