Srinagar: The Jammu and Kashmir Police’s State Investigation Agency (SIA) has named five former militants of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), including its former chief commander Mohammad Yasin Malik, in the abduction and killing of SKIMS Soura nurse Sarla Bhat in April 1990. The agency has decided to chargesheet Malik and his former associate Khursheed Ahmad Chalkoo, while noting that the three other accused have died over the past 35 years.
According to the investigation, the five accused are Malik of Maisuma, Srinagar; former JKLF chief commander Abdul Hamid Sheikh of Dandarkhah, Batmaloo; Ghulam Mohammad Taploo of Anchar, Srinagar; Mohammad Yousuf alias Idrees of Mallabagh; and Khursheed Ahmad Chalkoo.
The SIA said Abdul Hamid Sheikh, Ghulam Mohammad Taploo and Mohammad Yousuf alias Idrees are deceased. Sheikh was killed in a 1992 encounter with the BSF near Aalikadal in Srinagar, Taploo reportedly died of natural causes in 2018, while Idrees was allegedly killed in an inter-group rivalry following a crackdown by Hizbul Mujahideen on the JKLF in the mid-1990s.
Malik, who has been lodged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail since his arrest in 2019, is serving a life sentence awarded by an NIA court in a terror funding case. He is also facing trial in the CBI cases related to the December 1989 kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed and the January 1990 killing of four Indian Air Force personnel in Jammu.
The SIA said Chalkoo is believed to have fled to Pakistan more than two decades ago. Proclamation proceedings are likely to be initiated against both Malik and Chalkoo as the agency moves to prosecute them in the Sarla Bhat murder case.
Sarla Bhat, a nurse at SKIMS Soura, was abducted and later found dead with bullet injuries in Srinagar’s Mallabagh area on April 19, 1990. The case remained unresolved for decades before the SIA reopened the investigation.
