Posted on 06/25/2003 7:29:31 AM PDT by LurkedLongEnough
Islamic rebels battling Indian rule in Kashmir are swapping their guns for hypodermic syringes so as to pump deadly poison into their victims in the disputed Himalayan region, police said.
Police officials in Jammu, the winter capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, said "innocent civilians" were the primary targets of the poisonous injectables now being used by guerrillas in the southern zone of the state.
"From pumping bullets to slitting throats, the rebels have (now) started injecting poison into their targets, resulting in instant death," a spokesman for the regional police department told AFP.
Since the weekend, two people - 45-year-old Rani Begum and 50-year-old Feroze Din - died in southern Surankot district after being administered poisonous injections, he said.
The militants began to change tactics following global outrage over a massacre on March 24 in the central Kashmiri village of Nadi Marg that saw children, women and men lined up by rebels and gunned down in cold blood.
The police spokesman said the militants now seemed to prefer quieter murders in Kashmir, where separatist strife has claimed more than 38,500 lives since the launch of the anti-Indian rebellion here in 1989. Separatists put the figure at twice that.
Surankot police station chief Surjit Dutta said the viscera of the two latest victims has been sent for forensic tests to determine the nature of the poison.
He said a thorough check of local pharmacies established that the poisonous injectables had been imported into Surankot, possibly from adjoining Pakistan.
Surankot in Poonch district is 225 kilometres west of Jammu and is believed to be a staging post for Islamic guerrillas sneaking in from the Pakistani-zone of divided Kashmir.
"Militants carry these deadly injections in their pockets which allows them easy mobility," Dutta said, noting that movements with firearms were difficult in Surankot because of the current deployment of thousands of troops.
The Indian army on April 21 in Surankot launched its biggest operation since 1999, killing 62 rebels on the first two days of the gunship-backed raids.
The police spokesman in Jammu said the poison-filled syringes appeared to have strategic importance for the militants.
"Preliminary inquiries have indicated the rebels began injecting poisonous injectables to deny Indian forces a chance to learn about the acts in time," he said.
"Another reason could be that the rebels are facing a shortage of ammunition or are conserving it to launch bigger strikes against security forces."
The official said the gruesome tactic was also a likely method to discourage civilians from aiding military scouts with information on militant posts in the battle-scarred territory.
"Whenever the rebels slit the throats of civilians they were blamed for carrying out anti-Islamic acts and invariably such actions were attributed to foreign mercenaries," the spokesman said.
"They have now changed the strategy to cause confusion among Indian agencies investigating the nature of such crimes."
India says most of the bloodletting in Kashmir is done by cross-border rebels from Pakistan and blames Islamabad for arming and training guerrillas in Kashmir.
Pakistan denies the charge but says it openly offers diplomatic and moral support to what it calls the Kashmiris' just struggle for self-determination in the frontier region, India's only Muslim-majority state.
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