Srinagar, February 01, 2018 (PPI-OT): In occupied Kashmir, the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) has demanded fair and time-bounded investigation in the rape and murder of a minor girl in Kathua. The JKCCS in a statement in Srinagar said that the role of the police and the BJP’s local member of the so-called Kashmir Assembly in particular had raised serious suspicions of the intention in shielding the perpetrators and polarising the communities.
Locals told JKCCS that the filing of police complaint was deliberately delayed by the SHO and the investigations conducted thereafter were cursory and repeatedly transferred from one team to another.
It said, “Copies of the FIR and the medical examination report have not been provided to the family. Despite the local community having a strong inkling of the identity of the perpetrators, after the child’s body was recovered, a single individual, a 15-year-old boy, was arrested as the sole culprit.”
“The case also exposes a long-standing pattern of communalizing issues that take place in Jammu, by local and Jammu politicians, particularly from the BJP,” the statement said. “The JKCCS appealed to women’s groups and civil society in Jammu and elsewhere to come out in support of the local Gujjar – Bakerwal community,” it added.
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