Jammu, 12 August (H.S.): The Jammu and Kashmir Police’s State Investigation Agency (SIA) on Wednesday conducted searches at nine locations across Jammu and Kashmir in connection with the 1990 killing of renowned Kashmiri Pandit poet and writer Sarwanand Kaul Premi and his younger son Virender Kaul.
The searches were carried out in connection with FIR No. 45/1990 registered at Police Station Dooru in Anantnag district. The case has since been taken over by the SIA for investigation, officials said.
Further details regarding the locations searched and the material or evidence recovered during Wednesday’s operation are awaited.
Premi, 65, and his 27-year-old son Virender were killed by militants in May 1990 in their native village in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district. Within a week of the killings, the Kaul family left Kashmir.
Premi was a noted poet, writer and translator who authored more than three dozen books. His literary works included translations of the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ into Urdu, the ‘Ramayana’ into Kashmiri and Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Gitanjali’.
The latest searches come over a month after the SIA filed a chargesheet in another long-pending case linked to the killing of Kashmiri Pandit nurse Sarla Bhat in 1990.
On June 29, the agency filed a 737-page chargesheet before a special court in Srinagar, naming five Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) operatives, including its jailed former chief Mohammad Yasin Malik, in connection with Bhat’s abduction and killing. Three of the accused have since died, while Khursheed Ahmad Chalkoo is absconding and is believed to have fled to Pakistan.
The SIA had reopened the Sarla Bhat case as part of its efforts to investigate long-pending cases dating back to the early period of militancy in Kashmir.
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Hindusthan Samachar / Krishan Kumar
