‘Terrorists wear Pathan suits’: How tribunal justified soldiers’ bail

NEWDELHI: Wearing a Pathan suit in Kashmir can be dangerous, so much so that one can be taken for a terrorist and killed by security forces. A military tribunal, which granted bail this week to five army soldiers convicted of killing three people in a staged shooting in Valley’s Macchil sector in 2010, said it believed the dead were terrorists because they wore Pathan suits.

In its bail order, the Armed Forces Tribunal, said, “The fact that the accused persons were terrorists… cannot be ruled out because they were wearing Pathan suits which are worn by terrorists.” The flowing Pathani suit is common men’s clothing in Valley. HT has a copy of the order.

The extra-judicial shooting came to be known as the Machil fake encounter in which three civilians were killed in cold blood by soldiers looking to collect a bounty on militants. Subsequently, an army court sentenced six soldiers, including a colonel, to life in jail but five of them went into appeal before the AFT in New Delhi.

The AFT said they believed the three men killed were not civilians because they had ventured too close to the de facto border between India and Pakistan, which is often used by militants to travel between the two countries. “There was absolutely no justification for a civilian to be present at such a forward formation near LoC, that too during the night when infiltration from across the border was high,” the AFT bench said.