Thousands of people on Sunday night took part in the funeral prayers of a Qamarwari resident who Jammu and Kashmir Police said was killed in a train accident in Budgam.
Amid pro-freedom sloganeering, the body of Ghulam Muhammad Haroon, 45, was brought to Jamia Masjid where funeral prayers were held for him. He was later laid to at his ancestral graveyard at Malkhah.
Earlier, protests were held in Qamarwari when his body reached there.
The relatives alleged that Haroon has been murdered, even as police claimed that he died in a train accident in Budgam.
According to his relatives, Haroon had left in the morning to purchase vegetables at nearby Safakadal locality. “We want to know how his body reached Budgam? There is a hole in his shin as well. His face is fully damaged,” said his relative Ghulam Mohammad Matta.
As the news of his death spread in the locality, people mostly youth got enraged and took to streets. They paraded his body through the locality, raising slogans.
Police said that they went to take the body for post mortem, but enraged people did not allowed them to do it. “People are saying that he has been murdered. Who will decide how he was killed? That could have been done through post mortem,” said Mehraj Ahmad, Station House Officer Qamarwari.
Later, in a statement, a police spokesman said that Haroon, a resident of Rampora Chatabal, met with an accident with Budgam-bound train near Sepdan railway station.
“For medical attention, he was brought to the district hospital Budgam by railway police post Budgam where he was declared brought dead by the doctors,” he said.