GANDERBAL: "The Clothes Were Neat and Clean…. It Was Raining That Day." The moment Ajaz Ahmad Mughal opened the ambulance door and saw his brother, nothing made sense.
When the ambulance door swung open at Police Control Room (PCR) Batmaloo in Srinagar, Ajaz Ahmad Mughal felt his legs go numb.
Inside lay a body. The face was crushed. The clothes were wrong.
"I couldn't believe my eyes that it was my brother in this condition," Ajaz said. "The first things I noticed were that the clothes had been changed, the face seemed crushed, the shoes were different."
His younger brother Rashid Ahmad Mughal had left home on the morning of March 31, wearing a Kameez Shalwar. The man in the ambulance was dressed in green trousers, with a bandage tied around his waist in place of a belt, and a pair of new black shoes resembling army commando boots.
Then Ajaz noticed something that would stay with him.
"It was raining that day," he said. "So, I was confused. How were the clothes neat and clean? They should have been dirty, soaked in wet soil."
On the intervening night of March 31 and April 1, the army claimed to have gunned down a militant in the Arahama area of Ganderbal district in central Kashmir, recovering an AK-56 rifle, three magazines, 67 live rounds, and 58 empty rounds from the site but did not identify the person killed.
The following day, the family of Rashid Ahmad Mughal, 30, a commerce post-graduate from Chount Waliwar village in Lar, Ganderbal, filed a complaint with the police alleging it was their son with no links to militancy, who had been slain.
Rashid, who had completed his B.Com from Degree College Ganderbal and later his M.Com from Islamia College of Science and Commerce affiliated with the University of Kashmir, was known in his village as someone who helped neighbours navigate bureaucratic paperwork required for domicile certificates, Aadhaar cards, documents that remain out of reach for many ordinary people. His cousin Imran Ahmad Mughal, said that he travelled 2-3 kilometres between home and Lar for work, and nothing more.
On March 31 morning, Rashid had left home for routine work. By evening, he had not returned. The family waited.
"He would never be this late," Ajaz said. "We were worried, why didn't he come home?"
Ajaz began calling his brother's phone. Between 6:30 PM and 7:30 PM. The call wouldn’t go through, the phone seemed switched off. He told himself, perhaps the battery had died. Perhaps Rashid couldn't get to a charger. The family stayed awake.
"We couldn't sleep the whole night," he said. "We were so tense about his whereabouts."
The next morning, April 1, Ajaz was at his workplace at Nallah Sindh, where he had gone for labour work. He tried calling again between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM. The phone remained switched off.
At around 10:00 AM, the SHO of Ganderbal arrived at the work site. He told Ajaz that his brother had met with an accident. Ajaz was taken in a police vehicle to Lar Police Station in Ganderbal, then transferred to another vehicle and driven to PCR Batmaloo, Srinagar.
An ambulance was parked outside.
After the identification, Ajaz was handed a stack of papers and asked to sign.
"They asked me to sign at least 15 papers," he said. "I had no idea what the papers were about or what was written on them. I am uneducated."
He signed.
Rashid's body was then taken for a postmortem. Ajaz accompanied it.
"At least twelve bullets were retrieved from his body in front of me," he said, his voice quietening. "I assume there were more, but I couldn't see. I was exhausted seeing my brother in this condition."
After the postmortem, Ajaz was asked to board the ambulance once more, alongside his brother's body. He assumed they were going home. He had been thinking of the funeral prayers, of laying Rashid to rest among family, among people who knew him.
The ambulance turned in a different direction.
"I asked the police where we were going," Ajaz said. "They told me they were taking my brother to Handwara to bury him there. The grave had already been dug."
There was no ritual bath. Rashid Ahmad Mughal, wrapped only in a white shroud was buried in a militant graveyard in Rajwar, Handwara, Kupwara district, 75 kilometres away from the village where he had grown up. It was around 4:00 PM.
Ajaz had pleaded with the security personnel to hand over the body so the family could take him home. They refused. An argument broke out. He resisted and his arms suffered injuries as they pinned him down in the ambulance. For about two hours, he was kept locked inside the ambulance with his brother's body. He was let out only when the burial began.
Ghulam Mohammad Turk, a neighbour from Chount Waliwar, was blunt. "Rashid Ahmad Mughal was killed mercilessly. He was not a militant. He was a social worker; he loved helping people in this village. I am shocked at his death and at the label of terrorist being put on him. I knew him personally."
PDP leader Iltija Mufti, who described Rashid as a PDP worker and visited his family, said, "Kashmir is the only place where you can kill anyone and later label them a terrorist. Whoever killed Rashid — be it the Army, police, or anyone — must be held accountable. The law is the same for all." She warned that if the body was not returned, PDP would stand alongside the family on the streets.
According to the Scroll, villagers in Arhama said that the firing during the purported gunfight lasted no more than ten minutes, pointing to the stark contrast to the hours-long exchanges that typically characterise encounters in Kashmir. This brevity carries a particular weight for the Mughals, who had already lost a son to militants in 2000 - Ishfaq Ahmad Mughal had been working as an Army source when he was abducted and killed.
It has been almost three weeks since the Lieutenant Governor ordered a Home Department inquiry, to be completed within seven days, between April 3 and April 10, but the family of Rashid Ahmad Mughal says no findings have been shared and no update provided. No counter FIR has been registered either. When the family approached the SSP Ganderbal, they were told that without a magisterial inquiry, a judicial inquiry could not be taken into cognizance.
The questions the family is asking are simple. In January and February, the army conducted verification drives across the village, collecting data on every resident. Everything was collected - their names, professions, possessions, the old and the young, women and children. Rashid was among those verified.
"If my brother was a militant, why was he not identified then?" asked his cousin Imran Ahmad Mughal. "They know everyone here, how could Rashid Mughal be declared a foreign terrorist? Before he was killed, he was at home. In two or three hours, he became a trained foreign terrorist…… for their so-called medals," Imran said, his voice carrying a mix of anguish and anger, as he breaks down midway.
The family's fear now reaches beyond Rashid. "It is not about one person," Imran said. "They can take anyone from this village, one by one, and label them a terrorist. If nothing happens, we cannot control the villagers."
The family of Rashid Ahmad Mughal is neither asking for justice or compensation. Their demand is woefully simple: “Give us his body.”
As the State claims authority not just over life, but over death itself, back home Rashid’s family continues to wait.
His sister, Naseema, waits at the door for her brother’s body, to see the last glimpse, her eyes exhausted from tears, her lips parched.
In the lawn outside their house, they have marked out a patch of land, the spot where they want to bury Rashid, to have him near. But the body has not come. Each time they ask, they are told: two more days. Then two more days again.
"Our brother is gone and can never return," Ajaz said, his eyes filling. "But we want the body back, we want the exhumation so that we can at least breathe knowing he is here with us, close to us." He paused, glancing at the empty patch of earth in the lawn. "The eyes are still waiting."
Rashid Ahmad Mughal's family is not the first in Kashmir to be denied the body of a son.
Since April 2020, authorities have routinely buried those killed in anti-militancy operations in remote graveyards, far from home and family, without handing over the bodies. The graveyard in Wadder Payeen, Handwara, where Rashid now lies, holds an estimated 150 such graves.
The most documented case remains the Hyderpora encounter of November 15, 2021, where security forces claimed four militants were killed. Three were buried in secret before families could intervene. When the families of Altaf Bhat and Dr Mudasir Gul, both Srinagar businessmen, petitioned the High Court, the bodies were exhumed and returned. DNA testing confirmed they were civilians.
The exhumation happened three days after the burial, in the early hours before dawn. Families were told to ensure burial was completed before morning. "Waiting till daylight was not an option," a grieving family member said.
The family of a third victim, Amir Magrey, fought a legal battle through the High Court and Supreme Court for 19 months before being allowed simply to visit the grave, not to exhume the body, only to offer prayers. His father, 60-year-old Mohammad Lateef Magrey, said he felt "relieved", not because justice had been done, but because he finally knew where his son was buried.
Before that, he had spent eight months digging patches of earth with a shovel and spade, searching for the buried body of his 25-year-old son.
In Bandipora in April 2025, 29-year-old daily-wage labourer Altaf Hussain Lali was killed in an alleged encounter in the Ajas area. His family alleged he had been summoned to a local police post two days before his death and was in custody at the time. His body was buried in a distant graveyard in Bangus without being handed over to the family. He left behind a wife and four children.
The father of a teenager killed in an alleged fake encounter on December 30, 2021, in Lawaypora was booked under UAPA for organising a protest demanding the return of his son's body. Mushtaq Ahmed Wani was left with an empty grave he dug for his son that winter.
Justice, in most of these cases of alleged fake encounter and custodial killings, has not come in the last three decades. Since 2020, the bodies have also been secretly buried, sometimes grudgingly returned after court intervention, sometimes never.
The practice of secret burials began under the cover of Covid-19 protocols banning mass gatherings, but quietly outlasted every other pandemic restriction.
Officials have since justified it on security grounds, pointing to the funeral of militant Burhan Wani in 2016, which drew vast crowds, triggered waves of anti-India protests, and saw mourners shower flowers and sweets over the body. Senior security officials argued that the "dignity in death" extended to militants at such funerals attracted young men to militancy, and that denying public burials was a way to break that cycle.
But critics point to what the policy has broken - the right of families to bury their dead with dignity at home, among those who loved them.
Human Rights Lawyer Faesal Ahmad said, “The right to a decent burial is an integral part of the fundamental rights enshrined in our Constitution. Supreme Court and various High Courts have consistently upheld this right.”
He added that even under international law, particularly the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the right to burial with honour is recognised. Keeping family members aloof from this right would violate Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India, he said, reminding that the J&K HC upheld this right of the family of Hyderpora encounter victims, facilitating their exhumation.
(The identity of the reporter has been withheld for the safety reasons.)
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