Jammu and Kashmir police has initiated the exhumation proceedings of the body of a villager killed in a north Kashmir encounter allegedly as a foreign militant last month.
This followed wide spread allegations that the 'militant' killed had been a south Kashmir carpenter who had been framed and killed in the fake encounter.
The government had on Sunday evening ordered the arrest of two police officials and attachment of district police chief Ganderbal, Hans Raj Parihar and Bahadur Ram, deputy police superintendent of counter insurgency, Special operations Group in connection with the disappearance of the missing carpenter.
Relatives of the carpenter, Abdul Rehman Paddar of Larnoo village in south Kashmir's Anantnag district, had filed a complaint with the police that Rehman had been missing from the Batmaloo area of the summer capital since December, 8 last year.
Farooq Ahmad, deputy inspector general of police Central Kashmir range entrusted with the supervision of the investigations into the fate of the missing carpenter took a meeting of the special investigation team on Monday.
"A team from the national forensic lab, Chandigarh, is being requisitioned to assist the exhumation and subsequent DNA testing of the slain person to establish his identity," Farooq Ahmad told rediff.com.
The family members who feared that Rehman may have been killed informed the police that the carpenter had a mobile phone at the time he went missing and police found the phone in the possession of a member of SOG Ganderbal.
The recovery of the mobile phone from a member of the SOG, led to the unearthing of the mystery into the disappearance of Rehman. The SOG member told the investigators that he had been given the mobile phone by the assistant sub-inspector of SOG.
The grave of the slain person for whom exhumation proceedings have been initiated is being guarded by the police and it is reliably learnt that the team from the national forensic lab will be arriving within the next two days.
