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| India-Pakistan |
| Islamic fighters swap guns for syringes |
| 2003-06-24 |
| 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. He said a thorough check of local pharmacies established that the poisonous injectables had been imported into Surankot, possibly from adjoining Pakistan. "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. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |