The police on Wednesday said preliminary investigations point to Lashkar-e-Tayyaba militants being responsible for the murder of a youth in a mosque in Sopore. The militant outfit is silent on the incident. Reports said a group of suspected militants appea-red in Sopore’s Doabgah area, 52 km from here, at around 9.45 pm and seized a local youth, Ghulam Hyder, who was forced to call up his friend Suhail Ahmed Sofi from his mobile phone and ask him to meet him in the courtyard of a local mosque immediately to discuss an important matter. Suhail, his parents and younger brother and sister were preparing for dinner but he quickly left on receiving the phone call, his father told the police. The moment Suhail, a Class 11 student and son of a casual labourer, arrived at the chosen place, one of the waiting militants shot him in the leg with a pistol. Suhail ran inside the mosque and hid himself in one of the washrooms of the attached hamam (Turkish bath). But the assailants followed him, dragged him out, threw him on the floor and then shot him five times at point blank range, resulting in his instant death, witnesses said. The police, however, said the youth had escaped unhurt in the first attempt to kill him but one of the militants chased him into the mosque and shot him dead on the hamam floor. A group of Tablighi Jamaat was busy in a religious discourse at the place of worship when the youth was murdered and was shocked. The Tablighi Jamaat, a religious movement founded in 1926 by Muhammad Ilyas al-Kandhlawi in India, primarily aims at Tablighi spiritual reformation by working at the grassroots level, reaching out to Muslims across social and economic spectra to bring them closer to Islam. CM Omar Abdullah, making a statement in the Assembly in Jammu, said, “Suhail was chased by militants as he entered a mosque to take refuge but they shot him inside the place of worship.” Taking a dig at sections of mainstream Opposition parties, including “a particular faction of members (MLAs)”, he said they raise their voices vehemently against similar incidents in which security personnel are involved but keep mum when militants kill innocent people. “If this kind of killing had been committed by security forces they would have torn out their clothes, castigated the country and asked me to answer for the bleeding of innocent blood.”
