Srinagar, July 6: Tuesday morning, mourners were shouldering coffins of two youth, Muzaffar Ahmed and Fayaz Ahmed killed allegedly by troopers, as the funeral procession walked the Gangbuh Bund near Tengpora on the City outskirts. This was when some photojournalists including GK lensman Mubashir Khan reached to spot and zoomed out their cameras.
 The photojournalists kept clicking their cameras as the procession crossed the Bypass bridge and headed towards Tengpora.  A joint party of police and paramilitary CRPF intercepted the procession near the Tengpora Chowk.
 “We are not out for any stone pelting but to bury our loved ones. Please allow us proceed,” the mourners begged before the men in khaki. But the troopers responded with heavy teargas shelling and resorted to aerial firing. Some ran for shelter but others didn’t let the bodies fell on the ground as smoke continued to engulf the highway stretch.
 The procession took a right towards Firdousabad, Batamaloo. After a few hundred yards of journey, the mourners were this time intercepted by a CRPF mobile bunker and some other paramilitary troopers on foot.
 The procession again pleaded for “safe passage” saying this wasn’t any “stone pelting parade.”
 But before the CRPF contingent could utter a word, a senior police officer appeared on the spot and directed the mourners to take a U-turn along with the bodies.
 As the mourners resisted, there was another round of shelling and firing –heavy enough to make the bodies be left alone on the spot. One of the mourners, the father of one of the victims, mustered courage and didn’t run. Finding some troopers kicking the body of his beloved, he simply jumped over it and tried to stop the CRPF men from desecrating it.  
 The photojournalists captured the incident in their cameras. Now, some of the police and the paramilitary troopers shifted their fury onto them.
 From Farooq Khan to Danish Ismail,  Tauseef Mustafa, Bilal Bahadur, Altaf Hussain, Gulzar Ahmed, Imran Nissar to the GK lenseman everybody was thrashed, ruthlessly.
 Mubashir got several blows. But he recollects only three of them. One on the leg, the other on the arm, he says while showing the bruises. “But as the third blow hit my head, I lost my senses for some seconds and fell down saving my camera,” he adds.
 A few more blows made him conscious and he woke up and ran for shelter again towards the Bypass from where he and others had trooped in.
 “Even while trying to escape, we kept receiving blows from almost every trooper who came our way,” said Farooq Khan who also had a narrow escape while shooting the funeral procession.
 By the time the lens men got some first-aid, another victim fell to bullets. This time a woman at Batmalloo who the locals said was mourning the deaths. She died around a kilometer away from where Fayaz Ahmed  was killed in the morning. Funerals kept mounting. By evening a Maisuma youth Abrar Ahmed protesting the other killings got killed. He was the fourth in a day in the City where pro-freedom slogans reverberated in the air as mourners took to streets.

Lastupdate on : Fri, 9 Jul 2010 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Fri, 9 Jul 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:00:00 IST