Srinagar, January 03, 2018 (PPI-OT):In occupied Kashmir, the Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL) comprising Syed Ali Gilani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Muhammad Yasin Malik has called for complete shutdown in Sopore town on Saturday, 6th January, to mark the 25th anniversary of Sopore massacre.
The resistance leaders in a statement issued in Srinagar called for the strike in the town to remember the massacre. Over 60 civilians were martyred and more than 350 shops and other structures including residential houses were gutted when the troops of Indian Border Security Force (BSF) set the town ablaze on January 6, 1993.
The leadership also called for a rally at Jamia Masjid Sopore and a peaceful procession to the martyrs’ graveyard on the day. Gilani, Mirwaiz and Malik in the joint statement appealed to the international community to investigate this massacre and other similar incidents in Kashmir and use influence and identify the personnel belonging to Indian forces involved in the war crimes.
Remembering the ill-fated day, the JRL said the great nations never forget their martyrs and they continue their struggle for which these martyrs have sacrificed their precious lives. They appealed to all the conscious people to assemble at the Jamia Masjid Sopore after the afternoon prayers where a program would be held by the joint leadership. It expressed their sympathy with hundreds of families who lost their loved ones or whose houses and shops were burnt to ashes on that fateful day.
The leadership said that humanity might have never witnessed such a heinous crime when a toddler snatched from the lap of his mother was thrown into the flames and when the hapless mother protested, she too was silenced forever by the bullets. Whole town was in rubble, houses and shops were turned into ashes and horror stories and ghastly tales were all around which shiver a person down his spine.
“The madness of these killers didn’t stop there, they fired upon and burned a bus en-route to Bandipora, killing and burning alive all its passengers. Resistance leaders said that this dance of death, with 55 innocent killings, 120 houses and 350 shops gutted, was a unique New Year gift from the masters of traitors,” the statement said.
They said Sopore has a distinction of being politically mature and emotionally affiliated with the freedom movement, for which it has been a thorn in the eyes of the stooges, and this doomsday of 6th January was just an act of revenge to subjugate and suppress the population.
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