Justice Warms Up Cold Ikhwan Trail

- Naseer Ganai in Bandipora

“MY heart has turned into stone. I no longer cry,” says Ghulam Qadir Dar as he enters his two-storey house in Saderkoot

Bala, a village in north Kashmir. Here, 23 years ago, he had seen the bullet-riddled bodies of his family members. They were allegedly shot dead by around 20 gunmen of the infamous Ikhwan, a Kashmiri counter-insurgency group established by former militants. On May 7, the police arrested one of the accused.

The assassins were mostly from Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, a faction which broke away from the separatist group Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen, and surrendered. The former sided with the security forces to fight against Pakistan-backed Hizbul-Mujahideen militants in 1994. They were notorious for loot, plunder and murders of Jamaat-e-Islami J&K workers, which was seen as the political force behind Hizb in the early 1990s.