A lamp was burning in the middle of a room that lit up the faces of two bodies covered in a blanket. Women recited wanwun (folklore sung during marriages) instead of an elegy to bid farewell to two girls slain by suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants on Monday.
Akthara, 20, and Arifa, 17, were killed by militants who barged into their house, dragged them out and shot them from point-blank range in Muslim Peer in Sopore.
“Some of them climbed on the rooftops, some entered inside [the house]. They took my girls out. We pleaded before them and asked them what wrong did the girls do? They said they would talk to them [the girls] and release them. Instead, they send back their bullet-ridden bodies,” Frecha Begum, mother of the slain girls, said.
Police said they have identified two of the three militants who were involved in the murder. “Two of them have been identified as Waseem Ahmad Ganie alias Sheer Yuni and Muzaffar Ahmad Naikoo alias Muz Molvi,” the police said.
Chief minister Omar Abdullah condemned the killings, “May Allah grant peace to the souls of the girls and their family the strength to deal with this tragedy and us strength to learn from it,” he tweeted. “If you can’t condemn the killing of these two girls, irrespective of your political beliefs and do so without qualifying it then shame on you,” he said.
