Group finds more unmarked graves in Indian Kashmir

SRINAGAR, India (AP): Rights workers have discovered several unmarked graves containing about 1,500 unidentified bodies in Indian Kashmir, a prominent rights group said Thursday, alleging that some of corpses were likely innocent people killed by government forces.

Researchers from the Association of Parents of Disappeared People, or APDP, says at least eight of the graves held more than one body.

An Indian official said the bodies were likely those of militants killed over the past 20 years in fighting for control of the Himalayan region. But the government has also opened an investigation into such graves.

Separatist groups there are fighting for the Indian-controlled portion's independence from predominantly Hindu India or its merger with mostly Muslim Pakistan.

More than 68,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the uprising and the subsequent Indian crackdown.

The association represents relatives of people who have disappeared in the violence.

Last year in a report titled, "Facts Under Ground" APDP had reported finding the unmarked graves of about 1,000 people near Uri, an area near the de facto frontier that divides Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir and referred to as Line of Control.

"We have found more graves of about 1,500 people buried as unidentified in three remote districts during our ongoing survey," Pervez Imroz, the group's lawyer, told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday. "We've found that at least eight are mass graves as they contain more than one body."

The latest report from the districts of Baramulla, Kupwara and Bandipore is part of the APDP's ongoing survey of the northern parts of Indian Kashmir, which is near the Line of Control and will eventually broaden to the rest of the state.

After last year's revelations, Amnesty International called for an independent probe into the unmarked graves.

On Thursday, Ramesh Gopalakrishnan, a researcher on the London-based rights group's South Asia team, said there had been no "responsible and serious" response on the subject by either the state or federal governments.

Indian authorities had dismissed the earlier revelations but this year the State Human Rights Commission, a government body formed after widespread allegations of human rights abuses by the army, paramilitary and police in the state, sought information on the issue.

"The state government has yet to responded to our notice," said Farooq Ahmed, an official of the commission said Thursday. All the state officials reached by the Associated Press declined to comment on the subject.

However, one senior police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said authorities launched an investigation last year when the revelations were first made. "Hundreds of foreign militants have been killed since the militancy started, and many of them have died in gunbattles on borders. Everyone knows they have been buried as unidentified," he said.

Human rights workers have complained for years that innocent people have disappeared, been killed by government forces in staged gunbattles, and suspected rebels have been arrested and never heard from again.

Rights groups say there have been an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 disappearances since the anti-India rebellion began in 1989.

The government says most of the people who disappeared are Kashmiri youths who crossed into neighboring Pakistan for weapons training.

The state government on Monday said 3,429 people have disappeared from their homes while 110 others disappeared from the custody of government forces in last two decades.

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Kashmir, a region divided between India and Pakistan, but claimed by both.