Nearly four years ago, suspected militants gunned down 40-year-old Babar Qadri, an outspoken lawyer and television panellist, inside his home in Srinagar.
No militant outfit owned up to the killing. In May 2021, the police filed a chargesheet against the six accused in the case including a district commander of ‘The Resistance Front,’ an allegedly rebranded version of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.
The lawyer’s family members were not convinced. They demanded an investigation into the killing by an agency other than the Jammu and Kashmir police.
Their misgivings were apparently shared by the Srinagar court where the case was tried. The court let off two of the accused on bail as the police failed to bring any evidence against them. It also transferred the case to Jammu and Kashmir police’s special wing State Investigation Agency.
Qadri’s assassination has been compared to the killing of journalist Shujaat Bukhari in 2018. The police originally blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba militants for Bukhari’s murder and claimed to have killed them in a gunfight. But, the journalist’s murder remains a mystery to this day, as the police failed to come up with a convincing explanation about the larger conspiracy behind his killing.
Qadri’s case, however, seemed to take a more promising turn. This year, on June 25, the State Investigation Agency appeared to make a breakthrough. It arrested Mian Abdul Qayoom, a prominent lawyer and an influential separatist voice in the state. Qadri was known to have been a critic of Qayoom. The friction between them was well-known among lawyers in Kashmir. However, the police have not put out any official statement detailing the reasons for Qayoom’s arrest so far.
Qadri’s family has reacted cautiously to Qayoom’s arrest. “After our repeated pleas, there is finally a reinvestigation happening in the case,” said a relative of Babar Qadri, who did not want to be identified. “We are hopeful that the conspiracy behind Babar’s killing will finally be unearthed.”
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
