Thaindian News

Srinagar, Aug 22 (IANS) A day after the Jammu and Kashmir rights panel revealed the presence of over 2,000 unmarked graves in the state, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah Monday sought the constitution of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to probe all the killings in the state in the last 21 years.

Talking to some reporters here, Abdullah said: “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be assigned the task to probe all the killings in the state. Whether the killings were carried out by militants or security forces, it needs to be probed.”

He said he had also demanded setting up of the commission when his National Conference was in opposition.

“And I repeat the same today. There is no way out but to set up the commission,” Abdullah said, to queries about the State Human Rights Commission’s report regarding unmarked graves in the Valley.

The state rights panel said here Sunday that there were 2,156 unmarked graves in 38 places of the Valley in which persons, whose identity has not so far been established, had been buried.

Unmarked graves are generally those in which the foreign guerrillas killed in gunfights with the security forces are buried with Islamic rites by the locals, to whom such bodies are handed over by the local police.

But, there are fears that some locals missing for quite some time after their mysterious disappearance could be buried in some of these graves.

The the police official, who heads the investigating wing of the rights panel, has in his report noted that the identities of the persons buried in such graves needed to be established.

Abdullah said the government too wanted answers to such questions.

“But it is too early to comment on it. We have a unified command meeting tomorrow (Tuesday) where we will discuss it,” he said.