2009 Shopian case

FOURTEEN years after the 2009 Shopian twin ‘rape and murder’ case, the Jammu and Kashmir administration on Thursday finally terminated the services of the two doctors Dr Bilal Ahmad Dalal and Dr Nighat Shaheen Chilloo accused of giving a false report. The doctors had conducted the autopsy of the victims, a young married woman (Nilofar Jan, 22) and her sister-in-law (Asiya Jan, 17). They were sacked for fabricating evidence so as to show the women’s deaths as rape and murder even as they had died by accidental drowning. The physicians were allegedly working in connivance with Pakistani agents.

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Public sentiment was aroused after the two doctors reported that the women had been ‘raped and murdered’, triggering violent public protests for nearly a month and a half after the bodies of the victims were found in a stream in Shopian on May 30, 2009. The protesters, led by Majlis-e-Mushawarat, an amalgam of separatist groups, pointed fingers at the security personnel for the ‘heinous’ crimes; the widespread unrest in J&K even threatened to derail the then NC-Congress coalition government headed by then CM Omar Abdullah. Five policemen were arrested in this connection. Along with the separatists, the doctors’ aim to create disaffection against the Indian state by falsely accusing the security forces of rape and murder seemed to have worked but only for a while.

To defuse the volatile situation, the probe was handed over to the CBI, which pointed out holes in the conspirators’ theory. The high court, too, intervened and ordered that the bodies be exhumed for another post-mortem, which was done by AIIMS-Delhi doctors in September 2009. It came to the fore that Asiya Jan’s hymen was intact, establishing that the women had not been raped. In December 2009, the CBI concluded that the women were not raped or murdered. The devious role of external agencies using locals to spread hatred now stands completely exposed.