Two policemen from the Special Operations Group camp at Kiyar village in Dachhan, Kishtwar, were found shot dead on Thursday, a day after they went missing on the way to an Army base.
SPO Rashpal Kumar, 45, and SPO Bobby Chand, 57, had been detailed for rotation duty at the Army's temporary operating base at Dharna in the Marwah sector. They set out on Wednesday and didn't turn up. Their phones were reachable at first and then switched off. A joint search by J&K Police and the Army started that evening.
Kishtwar MLA Shagun Parihar told ANI that the first body was found at around 8 am and the second at around 9 am. Both had multiple bullet injuries, according to officials. The belt numbers listed for them are 65 for Kumar and 920 for Chand.
Neither man's service weapon was found. That's the detail officials keep coming back to, and it's why the case is being treated as a suspected militant attack and not an accident or a personal dispute.
Quite a lot, honestly.
Police haven't said where exactly the men were shot, how many attackers there were, or whether the two were ambushed on the track or moved somewhere afterwards. Some reports say locals heard gunfire between Kiyar and Derana around the time the pair went missing. Nobody official has confirmed that. As of Thursday afternoon I couldn't find any report of a group claiming responsibility.
One version of the route has the two heading for a makeshift base of 17 Rashtriya Rifles in the Basnan area of Inderwal. Officials describe the whole area as remote, with patchy mobile signal, which is part of why the first hours of the search were slow. Earlier coverage also pointed to a few Hizbul Mujahideen militants believed to be active in the upper reaches of the district. That's a lead. It isn't a finding.
On Wednesday, militants fired on a CRPF party at Akhran near Mir Bazar in Kulgam district, south Kashmir, and three personnel were hurt. Two of them were described as stable by their doctors. Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha went to the base hospital that evening to see the injured jawan.
The Kishtwar bodies turned up the next morning.
This isn't the first time this season that a policeman has gone missing in the district. On October 14 an SPO posted at the Pedil police post vanished with his self-loading rifle and was found dead near his home two days later. Police arrested two people in that case, according to reports from the time.
Go back to November 2024 and there's the killing of two Village Defence Guards, Nazir Ahmad and Kuldeep Kumar, who were abducted while grazing cattle in the Keshwan belt. A group calling itself Kashmir Tigers claimed that one.
Jammu and Kashmir has around 32,000 SPOs. They're the lowest-ranked police personnel, hired locally, and they're often posted close to their own villages because they know the ground. Kumar and Chand were both residents of Kiyar Dachhan, the area where they served.
Parihar expressed grief and asked the Home Minister to make sure those responsible are held to account soon. Opposition parties attacked the Centre over the run of incidents, with the Kulgam attack and the Kishtwar deaths coming within a day of each other. Neither the Union Home Ministry nor the J&K administration had put out a detailed statement on the Kishtwar case when this was written.
Reinforcements have been sent to Dachhan. Drones and sniffer dogs were used while the two men were still missing, and the operation has now moved to finding whoever did it and recovering the rifles. Forensic teams will go over the recovery site and the bodies. If the weapons turn up, they could say a lot about who was involved and which way they went.
The families in Kiyar are waiting for the bodies to come home.
