By Jehangir Ali
Srinagar: Before leaving his home in Goripora village of Sopore police district in north Kashmir on Wednesday evening (February 5), Waseem Ahmad Mir, 27, a young truck driver, promised his mother Nisara Begum that he would take her to a good doctor after returning from Kolkata.
Since the onset of winter in Kashmir this year, Begum had been complaining of loss of strength in her legs. “As the eldest son of the family, he used to take care of his parents,” said Rashid Rasheed, his cousin.
On Thursday morning, security forces set up barricades around the village of Goripora to ensure a quiet funeral for Mir, who was shot dead by the army in Sangrama area on the Srinagar-Baramulla highway on Wednesday night after his truck allegedly jumped a security checkpoint.
Speaking with The Wire, Rasheed said that Mir had made a brief visit to home on Wednesday evening after loading his truck with about 800 boxes of Kashmiri apples in Sopore, the apple town of Kashmir.
The ill-fated truck was on the way to Srinagar where Mir was scheduled to pick up its owner, whose identity could not be immediately ascertained, before starting the long journey to Kolkata to deliver the consignment of apples. The shootout took place at around 10:30 pm on Wednesday.
According to Rasheed, the family got a phone call at midnight on Wednesday from the truck owner, who had been contacted by local police, informing them that Mir had met an “accident” on Srinagar-Baramulla highway and that he had been taken to Government Medical College in Baramulla in a critical condition.
In a tragic turn of events, when the family arrived at the hospital, they learnt that Mir had been killed in firing allegedly by the army. “They even delayed handing over his body for more than 12 hours under the pretext of postmortem examination. We had to wait at the hospital till the afternoon on the next day,” said Rasheed.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
