A retired Indian Air Force (IAF) officer, who is a crucial eyewitness in the killing of four IAF personnel in 1990, on Thursday identified JKLF chief Yasin Malik as the main shooter. Rajwar Umeshwar Singh, the eye witness, was among a group of IAF personnel waiting for the staff pickup bus at Srinagar’s Rawalpora on January 25, 1990, when he saw a man pull out a gun from under his ‘pheran’ and open fired at them, killing four of his colleagues.
Four IAF personnel, including a squadron leader, were killed in the shooting, while 22 others were injured.
Singh, a former IAF staffer and eyewitness for the prosecution, identified Malik as the main shooter after he was produced before a special court of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in Srinagar. Malik was presented before the court through video conferencing from Delhi’s Tihar Jail, where he has been incarcerated since 2019 in connection to a terror funding case.
“This is an important development in the case… the prosecution witness has identified Malik as the man behind the shooting,” Senior Public Prosecutor for CBI, Monika Kohli, was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
The development came after the TADA court in March 2020 framed charges against the JKLF chief and six others for their alleged involvement in the killing of the four unarmed IAF officials.
Who is Yasin Malik?
Yasin Malik, the 58-year-old who is currently serving a life term in Delhi’s Tihar jail, switched to terrorism and then joined mainstream separatism in the mid-1990s.
Malik joined JKLF in 1988 after the controversial 1987 Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir, and later became JKLF chief after the killing of the group’s chief Ashfaq Majeed on March 31, 1990. Among several cases against him, he is also an accused in the 1989 kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.
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