Shopian: For the first time in a long while, 58-year-old Manzoor Ahmad Wagay, a resident of Reshipora in South Kashmir’s Shopian district, was not feeling restless on Thursday.
His son Shakir Wagay, who was serving as a rifleman in the Army, was abducted by suspected militants on August 2 last year. Since then, the desperate father searched relentlessly for his son’s body – he had a feeling that Shakir had been killed. He began digging up every place he suspected his son could have been killed.
“I was restless for the past 13 months. How can a father be at ease when he doesn’t know where his son is buried? I knew he was killed and buried somewhere,” says Manzoor.
Shakir’s decomposed body was found on September 22 in Kulgam district. He was buried at his native village on Thursday afternoon in a graveyard near his house.
Shakir’s sister is consoled as his body is brought to his house for burial on Thursday. Photo: By arrangement
The burial has brought closure for Manzoor, who for more than a year wanted to give a proper burial for this son. “I could sleep peacefully for the first time in the past 13 months on Thursday night. Now I can offer fateha (prayers for the dead) at his grave every day,” he says.
There is also another reason for his relief. Some had claimed that Shakir had joined the ranks of the militants. “When he was abducted, I met officials to help me find him or his body. I was shocked when some of them told me that he could have joined the militancy. Now the recovery of the body has proven beyond any doubt that my son had not joined militancy,” he says.
Shakir was a science student. He joined the Army to support his family, which included his parents and six siblings.
“When he was studying in college, our family’s financial condition became weak after we suffered losses. He then started looking for a job and got selected to the Army in 2016,” they said.
The abduction
Shakir was posted at the Balpora Army camp in his native Shopian district just four-five days before he disappeared on August 2, 2020.
“It was the second day of Eid-Ul-Adha. He had come to deliver dak at the Beebagh Army camp and to have lunch at his home. After completing the official work, he reached home at around 11 am,” his family told The Wire.
Shakir had lunch and then visited his sister’s house. He left for the camp in his private vehicle at around 5 pm. “Barely half-an-hour after he left, he called me and told me to inform his commanding officer that he will reach the camp late as he had met a friend. Later, when I called him, his phone was switched off. I became worried and called his commanding officer. His commanding officer told me that Shakir had called him also and told him he would reach the camp an hour late,” Manzoor says. He believes that both the calls were made by Shakir when he was in captivity of his abductors.
According to Manzoor, his son was abducted by militants half a kilometre away from their home.
“Later I came to know that the militants were hiding behind a mulberry tree and parked their vehicles in the middle of a road. As soon as he reached there, they intercepted his car, boarded it and took him away to some unknown destination,” he says.
On that night, Shakir’s burnt car was found in a field 16 kilometres away from his native village.
Despite frantically searching for him for days together, the family had no clue about his whereabouts. They also made an appeal to the militants to tell them about his whereabouts. “If he is alive in your captivity, you should inform me. If he is dead, give me his body,” his father said in a video appeal to militants.
Their fears worsened when days later, Shakir’s blood-stained clothes were found in an orchard. This corroborated an eyewitness’s claim that he saw Shakir tied to a walnut tree with ropes and being tortured by five-seven persons.
In the second week of August last year, an unverified audio message which was circulated on social media, suspected to be released by militants, claimed that Shakir was killed and his body would not be handed over to his family in retribution to the policy of the denial of the bodies of militants to their families.
Since April 2020, authorities in Jammu & Kashmir have not been handing over bodies of militants to their families for burial. Instead, they are buried in graveyards in far-flung areas of Kashmir. While officials said that the bodies were not being handed over to their families to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the funerals of militants have long been a source of worry for security agencies due to massive public participation. Even the body of 15-year-old Hazim Bhat of Wangam, Qaziabad, who was killed in a shootout between militants and forces in May 2020, was not handed over to his family and was buried at Gantamulla, Baramulla in a graveyard reserved for militants.
Search for body
The finding of his son’s blood-soaked clothes and the audio message convinced Manzoor that his son was no longer alive. He beginning to search for Shakir’s body. He searched in orchards, meadows and streams.
“I would go out every morning with shovels and spades and dig the earth wherever I suspected that he could have been buried,” he says.
As he increasingly began to grasp at straws, when his daughter had a dream about the possible location of Shakir’s body, Manzoor set out there and started digging.
Manzoor even approached families of militants in the area to know the whereabouts of his son. “They said they did not have any information about him. I even managed to get the phone number of a militant who was active then and made a video call to him. I begged him to release Shakir or to hand over his body. But he denied having any information about him,” he says.
On Wednesday, another son of Manzoor received a call from a neighbouring village. He was told that a body that was lying on a roadside could be Shakir’s.
“I immediately went there and found the body in a decomposed state. When I went close, I immediately recognised that it was Shakir’s body. I could identify him from his feet, hair and a bracelet on his arm. My son loved to wear bracelets,” says Manzoor.
“There was no doubt left in our mind when doctors at Srinagar told us that the death had occured 13 months ago and the age of the person was around 24 years,” he says.