A SENIOR Superintendent of Police (SSP), who was placed under suspension in connection with the Pathribal massacre in 2000, has been reinstated after two-and-a-half years, after the CBI exonerated him, a top state government official said today.
‘‘The order reinstating Fargoq Khan was issued yesterday as the CBI has exonerated him of the charges of fake killings of five persons in Pathribal (in the Anantnag district of South Kashmir) in 2000,’’ the official told PTI.
Khan, who is at present attached with the Inspector General of Police, Jammu zone, was reinstated after remaining in suspension for 30 months. ‘‘I am neither happy nor sad. Justice delayed is justice denied and it took over two-and-a-half years to get me reinstated even though I was not a culprit,’’ he said. Khan was suspended by the Mufti Sayeed government in April 2003.
Government sources said his reinstatement came after the Under Secretary in the Union Home Ministry, Y P Dhingra, wrote to the Jammu and Kashmir government on July 27, 2005, for revoking the suspension of the IPS officer because he had been cleared by the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) and the CBI in the controversial incident.
The Pathribal incident dates back to March 25, 2000. The Army had then claimed to have killed five militants, who were allegedly involved in the massacre of 36 Sikhs in the Chattisinghpora village four days before that. The CBI, in its probe, held six Army officers guilty, but gave a clean chit to SSP Khan.
The Pathribal incident triggered massive public protests, with people claiming that innocent civilians had been killed and passed on as militants. Farooq Khan who was then SSP, Anantnag, was transferred a day after the police fired on a public demonstration on April 3, 2000. Later, the bodies of Pathribal victims were exhumed and DNA samples of the victims and their relatives sent for forensic tests to Kolkata and Hyderabad in the presence of the newly-posted police officers.
However, following a report in a national daily in 2003 that the DNA samples of Pathribal victims were ‘‘fudged’’ in a bid to shield those responsible for the killings, the Sayeed government set up a commission in July 2003, even as the probe was transferred to the CBI in February the same year. The Kuchhey Commission held SSP Farooq Khan responsible for fudging the victims’ DNA samples.
Khan had moved the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) which ruled in his favour in October 2004. He even approached the JK High Court, which quashed the findings of the Commission and ordered that Khan’s suspension be revoked.
The state government tried to obtain a stay, but it was rejected by a double bench of the court in December last year.
Close to CAT’s order, the CBI and the Union Home Ministry cleared Farooq Khan’s name, but the latest order extending his suspension by three months came on July 29, 2005, government sources said.
Only last week, Chief Minister Mufti Sayeed had told reporters that the suspended IPS official would be reinstated ‘‘very soon’’.
RSS
Feeds 
