Thousands of mourners on Monday turned up at the funeral of Mudassir Kamran Malla, a Kashmiri PhD student at his native place Parigam in southern district of Pulwama.
The 28-year-old Malla had reportedly hanged himself in his hostel room at Hyderabad’s English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) at the weekend and his corpse was airlifted to Srinagar earlier during the day on Monday.
The student’s death thousands of miles away from home has set off fresh tensions in Kashmir Valley as people have generally bought the hypothesis that he was murdered for being vocal during the recent protests against Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru’s execution.
On Monday, a general strike closed the Valley and, at places in Srinagar, Budgam, Baramulla, Kupwara and Bandipore districts, protesting crowds clashed with police which swung bamboo sticks and fired teargas canisters to restore order.
More than a dozen people were injured. Mutahida Majli-e-Mushawarrat or the United Advisory Council, a recently formed amalgam of various separatist groups, which had issued the call for the shutdown on the murder theory pretext has also asked for “Pulwama chalo” march on Tuesday.
President of Jammu and Kashmir’s religious-social group Jamiat-e-Ahle Hadith, Ghulam Rasool Malik, who led Malla’s funeral prayer endorsed the family’s claim that his body bore visible torture marks.
“If he was not murdered by somebody, how come his body bore torture marks? From where did these marks come from? Couldn’t the doctors who examined him after death in Hyderabad see these visible marks? These visible torture marks clearly indicate that this poor Kashmiri Muslim was subjected to torture before being killed and only an impartial probe can bring out the truth in this regard,” he was quoted as saying by local news portal.
On the insistence of the Mudassir Kamran Malla’s family, doctors at a local government hospital have taken forensic samples from Malla’s remains before he was laid to rest at the local ‘martyrs’ cemetery amid chanting of “We want freedom.”
Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah, however, said that there was nothing mysterious about the death of the student, who “ended life in Hyderabad under depression”.