Srinagar, Aug 25: The State Investigation Agency (SIA) has reopened investigation into the 1998 Wandhama massacre where 23 Kashmiri Pandits were brutally murdered in Jammu and Kashmir’s Ganderbal district, officials said on Tuesday.
The reopening of the Wandhama massacre case comes as the SIA has re-launched investigation into several cases involving the murder of Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley.
Officials said the investigation seeks to identify the terrorists and the persons who assisted them, and establish their role in the Wandhama killings.
On January 25, 1998, terrorists entered homes of Kashmiri Pandit families in Wandhama village of the central Kashmir’s Ganderbal district and killed 23 people, including nine women and four children.
On the eve of Republic Day, a group of terrorists dressed in Army uniforms appeared in the village.
They engaged in conversation with community members and asked Pandit families to assemble at one place, before opening fire — killing 23. The victims belonged to four families who had not migrated and stayed back in the Valley when militancy erupted in the early 1990s.
An FIR in this connection was registered at Ganderbal police station, but the case has remained unsolved for nearly three decades. According to police, the massacre was carried out by terrorists linked with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
The reopening of the investigation is part of an effort to re-examine terror cases that have remained unresolved, and to bring perpetrators to justice, officials said.
Along with the Wandhama massacre, the SIA has re-launched probe into the 1989 killings of Tika Lal Taploo and Justice Neelkanth Ganjoo.
Taploo, a prominent lawyer and the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir BJP vice-president, was shot dead near his residence in Srinagar in September 1989.
Justice Ganjoo, who had sentenced Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) founder Maqbool Bhat to death, was shot dead by suspected terrorists of the outfit at Hari Singh Street here on November 4, 1989.
Officials said investigation has been reopened in these two cases and the SIA recently conducted raids at several places across Jammu and Kashmir as part of the probe.
Recently, the agency concluded its investigation into the killing of Kashmiri Pandit nurse Sarla Bhatt by terrorists. The SIA filed a 737-page chargesheet naming banned JKLF chief Yasin Malik as key accused in the kidnapping and murder of the nurse in April 1990.
The SIA, which reopened the case in 2024, submitted the chargesheet before the designated National Investigation Agency (NIA) court here, 36 years after Bhat — a nurse at Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) Soura — was found dead in downtown Srinagar, a day after she went missing.
Earlier this month, the SIA carried out raids at multiple locations across the Union territory in connection with a 1990 double murder case of a Kashmiri Pandit writer and social worker Sarwanand Koul Premi and his son, Virender Koul, residents of Soaf Shali in Kokernag area of Anantnag, officials said.(PTI)
