Srinagar: The families of Altaf Bhat and Dr Mudasir Gul have finally managed to bury their bodies after conducting last rites. The bodies were handed over to them by the administration at around 1 am past Thursday midnight, after exhuming the bodies from a Handwara graveyard. The families buried the bodies later in the night at their graveyards.
An eyewitness told Kashmir Reader that the body of Altaf Bhat reached home at 1am, where his family, relatives and friends saw him for the last time. It stayed there for 15 minutes before it was taken to his ancestral graveyard, amid slogans and dirges, he added.
“It all happened in an hour,” he said.
Mudasir’s body was lowered into the grave in the same way. Relatives, friends, and family members participated in the funeral.
Their bodies were handed over to them by the administration around 1 am after their exhumation from Handwara graveyard and later buried them under tight restrictions at their respective local graveyards.
After public outrage, political pressure, and unrelenting demands from their families, the bodies of Srinagar civilians Altaf Bhat and Dr Mudasir Gul were exhumed from a graveyard in Wadder Zachaldara area of Handwara on Thursday evening. The bodies were handed over to the families after five days of public outcry that innocent civilians were killed in the Hyderpora encounter by using them as human shields.
Much before the arrival of the bodies, journalists had arrived at the spot at around 9 o’ clock. They waited there till 1am. But before the bodies arrived, a rumour spread in the area that photojournalists won’t be allowed to take photos. At this, the photojournalists huddled inside a kitchen at a neighbour’s house, hiding in an unlit room. When the bodies arrived, they mixed with people to mask their presence.
“And after the funeral, when we saw the police, we moved back inside houses,” one of them said.
The 44-year-old businessman Altaf Bhat, and Dr Mudasir Gul, a dentist-turned-businessman from Srinagar’s Rawalpora, were among four persons killed in Monday’s encounter at Hyderpora. While police dubbed Gul as an ‘over ground worker’ (term for those who allegedly work for militants) and said Bhat was killed in ‘crossfire’, the families of the duo vehemently countered the police claim and asserted that both of them had no links with militants and were forcibly taken by the police to the encounter site.

Junaid Nabi Bazaz