Jehangir Ali 
Srinagar: The bodies of a minor boy and two other civilians who went missing from a hilly village in Kathua district of Jammu and Kashmir earlier this week were recovered on Saturday (8 March).
Official sources said the bodies were recovered by a joint team of the army and J&K Police’s anti-militancy unit, ‘Special Operations Group’, near a small waterfall in the upper reaches of Kathua’s Billawar tehsil.
Besides the minor (name withheld), the deceased, who are 30-40 years old, have been identified as Darshan Singh from Dehote village and Yogesh Singh, a resident of Marhoon village.
Security forces had launched a search operation to trace the civilians who were reported missing on March 5 from Malad, a hilly village in Lohai Malhar panchayat, amid apprehensions of militant involvement in the incident.
According to reports, the movement of suspected militants was reported in the district in the last fortnight and their involvement in the incident is being probed.
Deputy commissioner Kathua, Rakesh Minhas, didn’t answer queries on the incident from The Wire. Senior superintendent of police, Shobhit Saxena, also couldn’t be reached for comment.
The deceased were part of a groom’s escort (baraat) on the way from Marhoon village to Morha Surag, which falls in the jurisdiction of Malhar police station.
he bodies were spotted by security forces lying near a waterfall in the upper reaches of Billawar in Kathua district. Photo: X/OSINTJK
In a police complaint by Shori Lal, a resident of Marhoon, the three members were missing when the ‘baraat’ reached Surag, “On reaching Surag, the three persons were found missing from the escort,” he told the police, prompting a search operation in the area.
Activist and People’s Democratic Party (PDP) leader Talib Hussain said that the incident has sparked fear and anguish among locals in Lohai Malhar and its adjoining villages in Kathua district, which has come under the spotlight.
The hilly district along the international Border with Pakistan in Jammu division has recorded a steady uptick in militant activities in recent months.
The incident in Malhar comes less than a month after two civilians, who had also gone missing, were found dead in the jurisdiction of Billawar police station on February 14. The bodies of Roshan Lal and Shamsher which bore strangulation marks were retrieved from the banks of a stream following which a case of murder was registered by the police who are also probing the involvement of militants in the killings.
Chief minister Omar Abdullah had expressed concern over the incident.
In recent weeks, security agencies have stepped up counter-insurgency operations to crack down on militancy in the troubled district where a group of foreign and local militants are believed to have taken refuge in the hills.
Since January this year, at least seven persons have been booked by the Kathua district administration on charges of providing logistical support to militants, per official data, under the Public Safety Act, a law termed as “draconian” by human rights groups.
The crackdown has also sparked allegations from the opposition PDP and others in J&K that innocent civilians of Kathua were being harassed under the garb of security measures.
On February 5, a tribal man from Bhatodi village of Kathua blamed police for torturing him in custody at Billawar police station before dying of suicide. His death prompted a court to direct J&K police earlier this week to file a First Information Report and investigate the allegations.
Police have said that the deceased was questioned over his suspected militant links and allowed to go home. A magisterial inquiry was ordered into the suicide, which sparked uproar across Jammu and Kashmir, following which J&K Police removed the station house officer of Billawar police station from his posting.
On July 8 last year, five soldiers were killed when a group of militants ambushed a cavalcade of army vehicles in Badnote village of Kathua, in one of the worst post-2019 attacks on armed forces in J&K.
The district of Kathua, which hosts the last leg National Highway-44 (NH44), connecting Srinagar with Delhi, before it crisscrosses into Punjab in the south, was freed of militancy in the years running up to the bifurcation and demotion of Jammu and Kashmir into a Union Territory by the Bhartiya Janta Party-led Union government in 2019.
In 2013, ahead of then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in New York, a group of suspected Pakistani militants had carried out an audacious attack on a police station in the heavily militarised district, killing four policemen.
The group of militants, believed to be fresh infiltrators, then commandeered a police truck to Samba district where they attacked an army camp and killed an officer among others.