J&K SIA raids nine places in 1990 killing of Kashmiri Pandit poet, son

Srinagar: The Special Investigation Agency (SIA) of J&K Police on Wednesday carried out raids at nine places in connection with a 1990 double murder case.

Officials said that the sleuths of SIA conducted searches at nine locations across Jammu and Kashmir in connection with the over three-decade-old murder case.

“The searches were carried out in connection with FIR No. 45/1990 registered at Police Station Dooru in Anantnag district, which is now under investigation by the SIA,” officials said.

More than three and a half decades after Kashmiri Pandit poet-scholar Sarwanand Koul Premi and his son Virender Koul were dragged from their home and murdered, the State Investigation Agency (SIA) Kashmir launched a coordinated crackdown on Wednesday, conducting simultaneous searches at nine locations across the Valley in a renewed bid to track down their killers and associates still at large.

Premi and his son, residents of Soaf Shali village in Kokernag, Anantnag, were abducted from their home in 1990, tortured and shot dead, their bodies later found hanging from a tree — a killing that sent shockwaves through the Valley and became one of the most chilling symbols of the terror campaign that drove the minority Hindu community out of Kashmir.

Premi was not merely a victim of circumstances; he was among the state’s most respected literary figures, a scholar-poet who had spent decades writing and campaigning for national integration, communal harmony and brotherhood between Kashmir’s communities.

He had also been a freedom fighter, actively involved in India’s independence movement, lending his killing an added weight as an attack on a lifelong voice of unity. Wednesday’s raids come close on the heels of a breakthrough in a related case.

In June, the SIA filed a 737-page chargesheet identifying jailed JKLF chief Yasin Malik as the mastermind behind the 1990 abduction, torture and murder of SKIMS nurse Sarla Bhat — a case that had remained frozen for 34 years before being reopened.

Bhat, one of the last Kashmiri Pandit women still reporting for duty as the Valley spiralled into chaos, was abducted near the hospital where she worked, tortured, and shot dead at Omer Colony, Malbagh, on April 18, 1990.

Wednesday’s raids were carried out at nine locations across Jammu and Kashmir, six in some areas of Rajouri district, two in Jammu, and one in the Valley in connection with the FIR originally registered at Police Station Dooru in Anantnag and now formally taken over by the SIA as part of its widening probe into unresolved militancy-era killings targeting the Kashmiri Pandit community.

Officials familiar with the operation said the searches targeted properties and individuals believed to be linked to the conspiracy behind the 1990 abductions, though the exact locations and any recoveries made during the raids have not yet been officially disclosed.

IANS