The family of Tufail Mattoo, has been for the past seven years trying to get justice for their killed son. This year as well, Muhammad Ashraf Mattoo, will be observing the eighth eighth death anniversary of his son, as a symbol of their ‘remembrance and conviction to fight for justice’.
“We will be observing the death anniversary at Gani Memorial Stadium. The ritual prayers of Fateha will be held in martyrs graveyard, Eidgah at 10 o clock,” Ashraf Mattoo says, vowing to ‘continue fighting for justice’.
Tufail Mattoo was shot by the Indian armed forces. A tear gas canister had hit him on the head, due to which he lost his life back in 2010. Mattoo was coming back home from his tuitions when the incident happened.
In the same year a spree of killings took place where 110 people were killed, out of which an overwhelming majority were children.
The then Chief Minister Omar Abdullah appointed a retired judge Justice ML Koul to probe the civilian killings of 2010. The Koul Commission report was handed over to the present Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti in December 2016 in which it was recommended that a CBI enquiry should be ordered in Tufail’s case.
However, the slain teenager’s father rejected the commission report and called it a ‘cover up’.
“I had appeared before the commission with a hope that the points raised by me in my letter to it would be considered. One of the main points was that it should also summon and examine the perpetrators responsible for my son’s killing and also question those who were at the helm of affairs in 2010, including the Chief Minister,” Mattoo had said.
“But, what appears, as is evident from the news reports about the commission’s final report, the perpetrators have been let off and it now appears to me that the judicial commission was just a cover-up,” he had added.
In 2017, on June 11, Muhammad Ashraf Mattoo, along with Farooq Ahmad Wani, father of Wamiq Farooq, another teenager who was also killed in a similar manner, had gathered and paid homage to the their sons who are considered as martyrs by the majority of the Muslim population of Kashmir.
