(New York) - Human Rights Watch today condemned the attack Saturday by gunmen on a shantytown in Jammu, the winter capital of the Indian-administered portion of Kashmir. Twenty-seven civilians were killed and about thirty were injured in the attack.
All parties to the conflict have an obligation to protect civilian lives," said Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director for Asia at Human Rights Watch. "Mass, targeted attacks on civilians are intolerable and must be stopped."
Human Rights Watch urged Indian authorities to undertake a prompt and thorough investigation and that persons implicated in the attack be prosecuted with all due process protections.
According to witnesses interviewed by local journalists, the attack began between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. when a small group of men carrying bags-and according to some accounts, dressed in the robes of Hindu holy men-threw grenades at a shop in Qasim Nagar, a migrant laborer colony near the Narwal bypass on the outskirts of Jammu. The men then opened fire on civilians who were standing nearby. Some witnesses reported that the gunmen were joined by others who had descended from an overlooking area, and then began firing on civilians in other parts of the colony. The assailants fled after a shootout with the police, reportedly in the direction of the neighboring Bhathandi Rakh forest. Most of the victims were Hindu migrant laborers or their family members from the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Orissa in northern and eastern India.
The state police chief, A.K. Suri, told reporters Sunday that Lashkar-e Taiba, a radical Islamist guerrilla group based in Pakistan, was responsible for the attack-a conclusion that he said was based in part on information that the group had been planning attacks in the predominantly Hindu Jammu region. The attack itself was condemned by the All Party Hurriyat Conference, an umbrella organization for the mainstream separatist political leadership in Srinagar, and the United Jihad Council, a grouping of Pakistan-based guerrilla organizations. The government of Pakistan also issued a prompt condemnation of the attack.
The attack is the second mass killing of civilians in Jammu in two months. In May, thirty-two people were killed when three gunmen hijacked a bus, killing seven, and then raided the residential quarters of an army base at Kaluchak. At least eighteen civilians were killed in the raid on the residential compound. The assailants were subsequently killed in an exchange of fire with army commandos. State police later claimed to have identified the gunmen as residents of Pakistan's Punjab province.
