Mazhama man whose disappearance from his bedroom still a mystery for his family

“I want to talk to my father once. When I see children with their fathers I also wish my father was here for me. I feel incomplete without him,” says Khalid, whose father Muhammad Yusuf Sofi went missing on 7 March 2004.

Yusuf’s family, which lives in Mazhama, went to Magam police station where the police registered an FIR on 7 March 2004. They went to several army camps, apprehending he might have been picked up by forces and subjected to the same fate as that of tens of hundreds of men who disappeared in the custody of forces.

   

Yousuf was 29 when he went missing.

“We went to his room to wake him up in the morning but he was not there. Everything was in mess. Nothing was in its place. Even the flooring had been scrapped off,” says his brother Abdul Ahad.

“He was alone in the house that night. His wife was expecting a baby so she had gone to her maternal home along with their two-year-old son Khalid. No one knows what happened that night in his room,” he said.

“If he is alive we want to meet him. If he is dead we want his dead body for the last rites,” says his elder brother Ghuman Nabi Sofi.

The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons has said more than 8000 persons have been subjected to enforced or involuntary disappearances in past three decades in Kashmir.

In 2008, EU passed a resolution against unmarked and mass graves in Kashmir. In 2011, the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) recommended for a comprehensive forensic examination into all unmarked and mass graves in Jammu and Kashmir.

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