Sorrow surrounded the village of Kunda Top in Shahdhara Sharief area of Rajouri district, when the villagers gave a teary adieu to the brother of a territorial army Jawan, who became victim of terrorists, when they killed him yesterday night.
Hundreds of people of the Razaq village offered the Namaz-e-Janaza prayers of the deceased at the Kunda Top village with teary eyes.
Razaq’s father also became target of the terrorists and he was killed by them in early 2000.
The terrorists came to kill Razaq’s brother Mohammad Tahir Choudhary, who is a soldier in the Territorial Army, but he escaped unwounded and Razaq got killed, who received a tearful adieu today.
After the target killing, the security forces and Jammu-Kashmir police has launched an intensive search operation to eliminate the terrorists, who killed Mohammad Razaq (40), native of village Kunda Top in Thanamandi, Rajouri.
Targeted killings against Kashmiri Pandits and minorities in the Kashmir Valley have been on the rise. The death of Kashmiri Pandit and bank guard Sanjay Sharma in Pulwama, last year, was the latest in a series of attacks against the minority community. These attacks have increased fear in the community and raised concerns about the lack of security. Sharma’s killing was the second such incident against Kashmiri Pandits in Pulwama, the first being Janki Nath’s death in 1990 at the peak of terrorism. Sharma’s attacker was killed in a follow-up operation. However, this has done little to allay the fears of the community. All the major political parties in the Valley condemned the attacks.
In 2022, terrorist attacks left 29 civilians dead, including three local Pandits, three other Hindus and eight non-local labourers in Jammu and Kashmir. The unrest led to 5,500 Pandit employees moving out from the Valley. Since 2022, India has witnessed 315 incidents involving violent murders. Of these, Jammu and Kashmir account for 160 incidents followed by the Maoist insurgency which was responsible for 126 incidents.
