960404

Indians protest

murder of Andrabi,

planned TK elections

NEW DELHI: Some 150 Indians marched to the Supreme Court here Thursday to denounce the murder of a prominent Kashmiri rights leader and planned elections in the troubled state.

The demonstrators, including lawyers and rights activists, marched some two kilometers (1.25 miles) shouting slogans against the Indian army for the murder of the abducted Kashmiri, Jalil Andrabi.

The demonstrators also denounced the proposed elections in May to fill Kashmir's six parliamentary seats, saying they had been imposed by New Delhi.

"If you want to know where on earth the worst type of human rights violations are being committed right now - it is in Kashmir,'' said Arobindo Ghosh, a protesters spokesman.

After marching through the capital, the activists from half-a-dozen human rights groups gave a memorandum to the Supreme Court asking it to stop extra-judicial killings in Kashmir.

Indian police escorted the demonstrators and forced them to take a designated route.

Ghosh said Jalil Andrabi, who also was a practicing attorney in Jammu--Kashmir state, was picked up by Indian soldiers on March 9 as he was traveling in a car with his wife and children.

His body, with its eyes gouged out and bullets lodged in its head, was found floating in River Jhelam on March 26.

"It is suspected that Mr. Andrabi was interrogated and then shot dead in cold blood, and his body was thrown into the river, the usual practice of the security forces in extralegal executions in Kashmir,'' Ghosh said in a statement.

Andrabi had complained about human right abuses in Kashmir in a speech to the U..N. Committee for Human Rights in Geneva in August, 1995. He had planned to do that again in May.

Ghosh said accounts maintained by a New Delhi-based human rights group, the Peoples' Rights Organization, show that the Indian security forces have killed about 600 people in the past six years in Kashmir after taking them into custody.

India's government said it has ordered its own investigation into the mysterious death of Andrabi - a probe that also was requested by the US State Department in Washington.

More than 12,500 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, when the Muslim insurrection erupted.-AFP/AP