:
Killed by militants in his office chair at Chadoora’s guarded tehsil office, Rahul Bhat, 35, was among the first batch of migrant Kashmiri Pandits who returned to his homeland in 2010 after two decades of migration and thereafter started living in the first guarded Sheikhpora transit colony for Kashmiri Pandits in Budgam. Twelve years on, around 75 Pandit families at the colony hit the streets on Friday as they expressed a deep sense of fear and despair about an uncertain future as in the 1990s.
The distraught family of the deceased Bhat, whose body was shifted to Jammu on Thursday, performed the last rites at the Buntalab cremation ground in Jammu amid protests and demand for justice. Bhat’s father Bitta Bhat, a retired policeman, had migrated in the 1990s from Budgam’s Sangrampora, an area where seven Pandits were killed by gunmen in a single day in 1997.
