SRINAGAR: Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front chairman Mohammad Yasin Malik has denied ordering or participating in the 1990 murder of Kashmiri Pandit nurse Sarla Bhat.
In a detailed affidavit submitted before a Srinagar court, Malik said that an Intelligence Bureau officer had told him in 1991 that security agencies suspected Khursheed Chalkoo, a former cross-border guide, of involvement in the killing.
Thirty-six years after the brutal rape and murder of Kashmiri Pandit nurse Sarla Bhat, the state investigation agency (SIA) of Jammu and Kashmir filed a definitive chargesheet before a special TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities) court in Srinagar in June last week.
The agency named Malik, then the outfit’s “chief commander,” and Khurshid Ahmad Chalkoo as the primary masterminds behind the 1990 terror crime.
Malik, currently lodged in New Delhi's Tihar Jail, has categorically rejected that he was involved in the killing. He also rejected an allegation that Bhat was an informer responsible for a Border Security Force raid in Srinagar in which he was critically injured.
"Ms Sarla Bhat was neither working for the security forces in any covert capacity nor was she in any manner responsible for the raid conducted at Narwara on 8 April 1990," Malik says in his affidavit.
"She was an innocent civilian. In my view, she was as innocent as my own thirteen-year-old daughter, Raziya Sultana."
The State Investigation Agency filed a chargesheet on June 29, 2026, in connection with Bhat's murder on April 19, 1990, naming Malik as one of the accused more than 36 years after the killing.
According to Malik, three SIA officers had questioned him in Tihar Jail on June 2 and 3. He says they confronted him with two allegations.
The first concerned an alleged handwritten JKLF note said to have been recovered from the scene and purportedly claiming responsibility for the murder while naming Javed Mir, Sheikh Abdul Hamid and Malik.
The second allegation, as reproduced in the affidavit, was that the JKLF suspected Bhat, a nurse at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences in Soura, of informing security forces about Malik's presence at the house of Hafiz Bazaz in Narwara and that Malik consequently ordered her killing.
Malik disputes both allegations.
He asks why, if the alleged note existed in 1990, neither he nor the other men named in it were prosecuted in the Bhat case at the time, even though security agencies were pursuing numerous cases against JKLF members.
Malik notes that when he was arrested on August 6, 1990, nearly two dozen cases under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act had been registered against him.
Yet, he says, the Sarla Bhat case was not among them.
"The omission itself completely belies the prosecution's present version and demonstrates that the allegation is nothing but a subsequent invention," Malik says.
He raises a similar argument concerning Hamid Sheikh and Javed Mir.
According to the affidavit, the prosecution now alleges Sheikh was among those who killed Bhat, but Malik says purported eyewitness statements implicating him were recorded after a delay of nearly 36 years.
He argues that Sheikh had been arrested in the 1990s and could have been implicated then had such evidence existed.
Malik similarly notes that Javed Mir was arrested in 1993 and faced several militancy-related cases but was not prosecuted in the Bhat case.
"The prosecution's present narrative resembles a fictional story rather than a genuine criminal investigation," Malik says, alleging that the case was reconstructed decades later to implicate him.
‘Who is Sarla Bhat?’
Perhaps the most striking assertion in Malik's affidavit is that he did not even know Bhat's name when she was murdered.
He says he first learnt of her killing on February 21, 1991, nearly 10 months after her death, while he was in custody.
At the time, Malik says, he had been transferred from Tihar Jail to a farmhouse at Mehrauli in New Delhi after Chandra Shekhar became prime minister.
Senior security officials visited him there, he says, including a Jammu and Kashmir police chief, BSF chief Ashok Patel and an Intelligence Bureau officer he knew by the code name "Dr Mathur", whose real name he later understood to be Mr Roy.
Malik says officials were exploring the possibility of arranging a dinner meeting between him and Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar, but he declined, saying he did not consider it appropriate for a prisoner to dine with the prime minister.
On February 21, 1991, Malik says, Roy visited him alone.
According to Malik's account, the IB officer told him that JKLF member Manzoor Islam of Anantnag had been arrested and interrogated.
Malik says Roy told him that Islam had been tasked with guarding Khursheed Chalkoo after Chalkoo had been taken captive by Hamid Sheikh.
According to the version Malik attributes to Roy, Islam left during the night because he believed Malik "would not have approved of any killing taking place in my presence."
Malik then recounts another episode involving Chalkoo.
He says that sometime in June or July 1990, while he was recovering at Astan Maholla, Nishat, from his injuries, Hamid Sheikh came to see him accompanied by a young Muslim woman.
Sheikh, according to Malik, alleged that Chalkoo had abducted the woman "with improper intentions."
Malik says his own observation did not support that account and that it appeared to him that the woman had accompanied Chalkoo voluntarily.
Sheikh also allegedly told Malik that Chalkoo was being held at different locations in the Alastang-Ganderbal area and that he intended to kill him.
Malik says he told Sheikh that because of his fractured neck, paralysis and other injuries, he was bedridden and unable to supervise operational matters.
He says he told Sheikh that as acting head, he did not need Malik's approval but added: "If he intended to kill Khursheed Chalkoo, he should not do so in my presence, because I could not bear to witness the killing of any person before my eyes."
It was during this February 1991 conversation, Malik says, that Roy mentioned Sarla Bhat.
"During the same conversation, Mr Roy told me that the security agencies suspected Khursheed Chalkoo of being involved in the murder of a young Kashmiri Pandit woman named Ms Sarla Bhat," Malik states.
He says his immediate response was: "Who is Sarla Bhat?"
"This was the first occasion on which I heard the name of Ms Sarla Bhat or became aware that such a tragic incident had taken place," he says.
Malik says he then asked Roy whether investigators had discussed Bhat's murder with Hamid Sheikh, who was in Jammu Jail and had been interrogated several times.
According to Malik, Roy said they had not.
Malik argues that if an incriminating note naming himself, Sheikh and Mir had genuinely existed in 1990 or early 1991, it was difficult to understand why it never surfaced during his interactions with senior officers from the Intelligence Bureau, BSF, CRPF and Jammu and Kashmir Police.
Who was Khursheed Chalkoo?
Malik devotes a separate section of his affidavit to the backgrounds of Khursheed Chalkoo and a man he identifies as Captain Rashid.
According to Malik, the two came from villages near the Line of Control, in the Tangdhar and Uri areas.
He says they were arrested around 1988-89 on allegations of helping Kashmiri youths cross the border and were believed to have worked as guides.
Malik carefully qualifies another assertion, saying it reflected the "prevailing perception" rather than his personal knowledge: people involved in such cross-border activity were sometimes suspected of operating on both sides of the frontier and maintaining contacts with different agencies.
Malik says Chalkoo and Captain Rashid escaped from Srinagar Central Jail around February-March 1990 "under circumstances that were widely regarded as unusual."
Captain Rashid, he says, was later killed by another militant organisation over allegations concerning his conduct.
Malik claims he was informed that the JKLF had also decided to act against Chalkoo and that Hamid Sheikh, then functioning as acting head of the organisation, authorised action against him.
Chalkoo, however, escaped.
After his release in 1994, Malik says he made inquiries about Chalkoo.
He was told that Chalkoo had gone to Pakistan-administered Kashmir, suffered a serious accident, became completely paralysed and was permanently bedridden.
Malik explicitly says he has "no independent means of verifying this information."
His present whereabouts, and whether he is alive, remain unknown to Malik.
"If any person was responsible for the tragic murder of Ms Sarla Bhat, the law must identify and prosecute the real offender on the basis of credible and legally admissible evidence," he says.
"An innocent person cannot be made a substitute merely because the actual offender has not been brought to justice."
Narwara Raid
A central plank of the prosecution allegation described by Malik is the claim that Bhat had informed security forces about his presence at Narwara, leading to the April 8 raid, and was killed in revenge 11 days later.
Malik rejects that sequence.
He says Srinagar was under curfew on April 8, with security forces conducting searches following the abduction of Kashmir University Vice-Chancellor Mushir-ul-Haq and Hindustan Machine Tools general manager H.L. Khera.
Malik says, he, Showkat Bakshi, Javed Zargar and Iqbal Gandroo arrived at Hafiz Bazaz's house. About 20 minutes later, BSF personnel raided it.
Malik says he jumped from the fifth floor while trying to escape.
He suffered severe injuries, began bleeding heavily, and lost consciousness. His associates were arrested.
According to Malik, the BSF did not initially know his identity and took him to SMHS Hospital believing he was unlikely to survive. He was later referred to SKIMS.
He says he remained in a coma for days and reports circulated that he had died.
Malik says that after his August 1990 arrest, a BSF commandant who identified himself as "Chand" told him that he had led the Narwara raid.
According to Malik's account of the conversation, the commandant said the BSF had no prior knowledge that Malik was in the building and had actually been searching for Hilal Beigh in connection with the hostage case.
Malik argues this destroys the alleged motive for Bhat's murder.
"If the officer who conducted the raid himself had no knowledge of my presence at the premises before the operation, it is wholly illogical and unsustainable to suggest that Ms Sarla Bhat supplied information leading to the raid," he says.
Malik also rests his defence on his medical condition.
He says the fall left him with a fractured neck, multiple fractures, facial paralysis, severe ear damage and serious head injuries.
He was arrested on August 6 and subsequently flown to Tihar, where, he says, a specialist medical team treated him.
Malik argues that on April 19, the date Bhat was murdered, he remained incapacitated from injuries suffered only 11 days earlier.
"It is therefore incomprehensible how a person who was unconscious, fighting for his own survival and widely believed to be dead could have participated in, directed or orchestrated the commission of the offence alleged by the prosecution," he says.
"This inherent contradiction strikes at the very foundation of the prosecution's case."
Malik also rejects the description of Bhat's murder as a revenge killing.
He recounts a separate 1996-97 incident involving a female journalist whom he believed had damaged his reputation. Malik says that although she later feared JKLF members might harm her, he neither threatened her nor authorised retaliation.
He presents that episode as evidence that personal grievance did not lead him to violence.
"The allegation that I ordered the killing of Ms Sarla Bhat out of revenge is, therefore, wholly false, unsupported by evidence and contrary to both my conduct and the objective facts," Malik says.
The claims constitute Malik's defence as presented in his affidavit and do not amount to judicial findings on either his alleged role or Chalkoo's possible involvement.
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