An arrest in Kashmiri lawyer’s murder leads to more unanswered questions

Nearly four years ago, suspected militants gunned down 40-year-old Babar Qadri, an outspoken lawyer and television panellist, inside his home in Srinagar.

No militant outfit owned up to the killing. In May 2021, the police filed a chargesheet against the six accused in the case including a district commander of ‘The Resistance Front,’ an allegedly rebranded version of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.

The lawyer’s family members were not convinced. They demanded an investigation into the killing by an agency other than the Jammu and Kashmir police.

Their misgivings were apparently shared by the Srinagar court where the case was tried. The court let off two of the accused on bail as the police failed to bring any evidence against them. It also transferred the case to Jammu and Kashmir police’s special wing State Investigation Agency.

Qadri’s assassination has been compared to the killing of journalist Shujaat Bukhari in 2018. The police originally blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba militants for Bukhari’s murder and claimed to have killed them in a gunfight. But, the journalist’s murder remains a mystery to this day, as the police failed to come up with a convincing explanation about the larger conspiracy behind his killing.

Qadri’s case, however, seemed to take a more promising turn. This year, on June 25, the State Investigation Agency appeared to make a breakthrough. It arrested Mian Abdul Qayoom, a prominent lawyer and an influential separatist voice in the state. Qadri was known to have been a critic of Qayoom. The friction between them was well-known among lawyers in Kashmir. However, the police have not put out any official statement detailing the reasons for Qayoom’s arrest so far.

Qadri’s family has reacted cautiously to Qayoom’s arrest. “After our repeated pleas, there is finally a reinvestigation happening in the case,” said a relative of Babar Qadri, who did not want to be identified. “We are hopeful that the conspiracy behind Babar’s killing will finally be unearthed.”

But some in the legal community are less confident. The murder case, like many other crimes in Kashmir, is now enmeshed in the complex politics of the Valley, which extends to the legal profession.

A powerful separatist voice

Qayoom is known as a strong advocate for Kashmiris’ right of self-determination and seen as close to pro-Pakistan separatists – he was often spotted in pro-freedom demonstrations. He was among the scores of Kashmiri leaders arrested after the abrogation of Article 370 and the scrapping of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood in August 2019.

He was also the 20-time president of the powerful Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association – an organisation about which the Union territory administration has had several reservations.

Since 2020, the administration has repeatedly disallowed elections to the bar association, citing its “secessionist ideology” and advocacy of “peaceful settlement of Kashmir dispute”.

Two weeks before Qayoom was arrested, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association had announced that it would hold annual elections by the end of the month.

In August 2022, Jammu and Kashmir police had raided Qayoom’s home and the residence of two other lawyers in Srinagar in connection with the Qadri murder case. It has taken nearly two years to make an arrest.

A member of Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association, who requested not to be identified, wondered about the timing of Qayoom’s arrest. “We can’t say anything with certainty but he was arrested at a time when the bar association’s elections were announced. He had been summoned multiple times before in the same case. They could have arrested him earlier as well,” he said.

Days after his arrest, the Srinagar district magistrate denied permission for the elections of the bar association, arguing it could lead to “breach of peace and disruption of public order”. The magistrate’s order also said that the bar association’s constitution was “antithetical to sovereignty and integrity of the country” and that it had a history of “providing free legal aid to anti-nationals”.

Weeks after Qayoom’s arrest, three other members of the bar association, including his nephew, have been detained under Kashmir’s harsh preventive detention law.

‘Threats and pressures’

In some respects, Qadri’s politics was different from Qayoom’s – and most other people in Kashmir.

Qadri’s family members recall how the lawyer lived dangerously, by appearing on national television news channels to debate Kashmir’s ‘Azaadi’ with jingoistic anchors and guests. In the debates, he would also call out all sides involved in the conflict, including separatists and Pakistan – something not many in Kashmir dare to do even now. It was not uncommon for Qadri to be labelled a “traitor”, “Indian agent” and “collaborator” on his social media posts.

Perhaps, that is why Qadri was always apprehensive about his life. According to his family, Qadri would receive threats from many quarters and had survived two attempts on his life prior to his killing.

At the time of his killing, Qadri’s family had alleged that the lawyer had sought police protection but was denied. However, Jammu and Kashmir police had said that Qadri had been advised by the police to change his residence owing to the congestion in the locality he lived in. Qadri had refused to shift.

“He wasn’t calculated. He didn’t know how to be diplomatic,” explained a friend of Qadri, asking not to be identified. “He didn’t mind mincing his words irrespective of the persons or organisations he was speaking about.”

Hours before his killing, Qadri had posted a video on his Facebook profile, underlying threats to his life. In the video, which is still available on his profile, the lawyer had criticised Qayoom and the functioning of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association.

“When I look at Mian Qayoom’s role since 1990 in the Jammu Kashmir High Court Bar Association, politics has been only carried on the basis of threats and pressures,” Qadri says in the video. Qayoom had no formal role in the bar association at the time.

Qadri’s father, Mohammad Yaseen Qadri, had told Scroll in 2020: “He wanted to bring internal democracy within the bar. He said that the current bar association has been turned into a fiefdom by Mian Qayoom and all.”

This antipathy was well-known among lawyers in Kashmir.

“In 2012, there was a strike called by the bar association and lawyers were supposed to abstain from work on that day,” recalled a colleague of the lawyer, in a conversation in September 2020, after Qadri was shot dead. “But Babar had attended a few habeas corpus cases in court that day.”

Soon after, Qadri’s membership was revoked by the bar association although the suspension order was never served to him.

By 2016, the acrimony had grown deep and somewhat personal. “In 2016, Mian Qayoom came to my home along with another advocate,” recalled the lawyer’s father at the time of his son’s death in 2020. “He told me that my son is canvassing in favour of his opponent and I should take care of him. He told me to bring back my son to a ‘straight path’ as ‘he’s in danger’.”

Mohammad Qadri also added that Qayoom promised to revoke his son’s suspension from the bar once he was elected.

Weeks before his murder, Qadri’s plea for revocation of suspension from the bar was rejected. “I believed that he would have given up all the animosity but it proved otherwise today,” Qadri told a local news agency in early September 2020.

The killing

On the evening of September 24, 2020, two visitors knocked on the door of Qadri’s residence in Srinagar’s Hawal area to discuss a case. A domestic help went inside to call the lawyer out.

Qadri came out and started chatting with them. It appeared to be any normal client-lawyer meeting. “They were carrying some files,” Mohd Qadri told Scroll a day after his son’s killing. “While Babar was still going through the files, one of the visitors opened fire on him. I saw him lying in a pool of blood in the corridor.”

Qadri had been hit by multiple bullets in his head. “Before fleeing, the militants fired a few rounds in the air. They could be seen in the footage of a security camera installed in the lane,” Vijay Kumar, additional director general of police, Kashmir, told reporters during a press conference a day after Qadri’s killing.

The probe

While the police arrested the three alleged assailants behind the murder in November 2020, the investigation failed to shed light on many crucial aspects.

According to the chargesheet filed by the Special Investigation Team on May 5, 2021, the plan to kill Qadri was hatched at Srinagar’s central jail by a cleric from Kashmir’s Kupwara district, Muneer Aziz War, and another undertrial, Towseef Ahmad Shah.

War was accused of killing his girlfriend’s former lover, while Shah was charged with firing at a security checkpoint in Srinagar in 2017, in which a sub-inspector was killed.

The police arrested the alleged shooter, 23-year-old Shahid Shafi Mir, from Srinagar. Mir, according to the police, was working with the Resistance Front militant Saqib Manzoor Dar. Once the plan was conveyed to Mir, the police said, Dar gave a pistol to Mir to carry out the killing.

Since Mir could not carry out the hit alone, he convinced two others to help him. Mohammad Asif Bhat, 24, who lived in Qadri’s neighbourhood, was tasked to keep a close watch on his movement. A chronic stone-pelter with multiple cases against him, 26-year-old Zahid Farooq Khan, also joined the mission.

On the day of the killing, Khan and Bhat entered Qadri’s residence, pretending to be prospective clients.

As Qadri began chatting with them, one of them informed Mir, who was waiting outside, to enter the residence as well. “On being signalled, he [Mir] entered the residence and fired three rounds upon the advocate and all the three accused fled from the spot,” the chargesheet said.

During the course of investigation, Qadri’s relatives identified the trio as the men who came to their residence on that day and shot at Qadri.

What the chargesheet is silent on is why the two undertrials planned Qadri’s killing and why Mir, Khan and Bhat agreed to carry it out.

“We know they have caught the people who killed him. But we want to know why he was killed and who was behind the larger conspiracy to get him killed,” argued a relative of Babar Qadri, asking not to be named.

Second, the weapon used to kill Qadri has not been recovered. Third, the chargesheet does not say how the two undertrials managed to hatch the plan to kill Qadri and convey it to the accused who actually carried out the killing.

All the three accused – Mir, Khan and Bhat – were picked up by the police days after the killing for questioning. They were formally arrested on November 9 and 10, 2020. The militant, Saqib Manzoor Dar, was killed in a shootout with security forces in Srinagar in August 2021 – while the trial in the case was on.

The two undertrials War and Shah, as well as Khan and Bhat, who lured Qadri into a trap, are over-ground workers of the militant outfit Jaish-e-Muhammad, the police said.

Over-ground workers is a generic term used for individuals who provide logistical support to militants, though they are not combatants.

But the police’s initial investigation fell apart during the trial. In January, a special designated court under the National Investigation Agency Act granted bail to War and Shah, who were accused of planning the killing of Babar Qadri, as the police failed to bring any evidence against them.

The families of the three other accused – Mir, Khan and Bhat – denied the involvement of their kin in Babar Qadri’s murder.

It is not clear what connections, if any, the State Investigation Agency has recovered between the three men and Qayoom. “The investigation is on and all the questions regarding the case will be answered once it is complete,” an official of the State Investigation Agency told Scroll. “Everything will be public at that time."