While each shovel of mud sliced from the mound hidden behind a tarpaulin screen, Ghulam Rasool Padroo watched. He said he was hoping against hope. But when the body was lifted from the grave, it took him just a glance to recognise his only son.

He wept. And when the news reached hundreds of angry villagers, kept at a distance by barbed wires and armed policemen, women wailed and men shouted slogans.

Although the exhumation was ordered to collect samples for DNA matching by a two-member team from Central Forensic Laboratory, Chandigarh, there was hardly any doubt left for the J-K Police investigators probing the killing of carpenter Abdul Rehman Padroo in a fake encounter by its own men 55 days ago.

The police had to fire teargas shells to push back angry villagers rushing towards the site. As the body was wrapped in a fresh shroud, Ghulam Rasool Padroo sat in a corner and lit a cigarette. The investigating officers were shying away from the 65-year-old man who had been searching for his son for last two months — only to find him buried a hundred miles away from home as a Pakistani militant.

How did you recognise him? “How can I not recognise my son? It’s him. It’s him,’’ he said. “I can recognise even his bone and here it is his entire body’’.

His brother Ghulam Ahmad Padroo, standing next to him, shouted: “We want the killers to be hanged. See how brutally they have murdered our son. If they wanted money they should have asked for it - we would have begged and given it to them. They killed him.”

... contd.