A seven-year love story of a Muslim girl from Kashmir and a Hindu boy from Jammu has ended in tragedy: the boy is dead and the girl — now his wife — has accused police of colluding with her family to kill him. Two policemen have been suspended and a third transferred, and the administration is struggling to put a lid on simmering tension that has already seen two senior officials being manhandled by mobs.

On October 6, Jammu businessman Rajneesh Sharma was found hanging in a cell in Srinagar’s Ram Munshi Bagh police station. He had been picked up from his brother Pawan Sharma’s home in Rehari in Jammu on October 2 by policemen who apparently mistook him for Pawan.

The Srinagar administration ordered a magisterial inquiry into the custodial death, and an autopsy was conducted. However, after the Sharma brothers’ mother Raj Rani identified the body as Rajneesh’s, a second autopsy was done at the Government Medical College Hospital in Jammu.

Rajneesh’s wife Anchal — who used to be called Amina earlier — told Jammu Deputy Commissioner Manoj Dwivedi today that she believed her family in the Valley had a hand in her husband’s death. “My father and brothers have killed my husband... you hang them,” she shouted, distraught. She accused her family in Kashmir of lying when they said she was underage, and declared she had married Rajneesh of her free will.

“When I left the Valley, my mother knew I was going to Jammu to get married. She prepared food for the journey,” Anchal told The Indian Express. “My family bribed the police, spent money to get my husband killed,” she alleged.

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