The APHC Chairman, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, on the occasion of the International Day of the Disappeared appealed to the world community to play its role in finding out whereabouts of thousands of innocent Kashmiris missing in Indian troops' custody.
According to Kashmir Media Service the APHC Chairman urged India to repeal all the black laws, which gave unbridled powers to Indian troops to commit gross human rights violations in the occupied territory with impunity.
He emphasised that withdrawal of the troops was a prerequisite to improve the rights situation in occupied Kashmir. Speakers at a seminar in Srinagar on Sunday, called upon the world human rights organisations to send their representatives to take stock of the ground situation in occupied Kashmir.
They included Gautum Navlakha, Zaheeruddin, Pervez Imroz and Mufti Bashir-ud-Din.
The parents and relatives of disappeared persons staged a sit-in at Pratap Park, in Srinagar on Sunday to draw world attention towards the grave issue of the missing persons.
The leader of Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, Praveena Ahangar, deplored India's indifference towards the miseries of the relatives of the disappeared. The data released by the research section of the Kashmir Media Service revealed that over 10,000 Kashmiris had been disappeared in Indian custody during the last twenty years. The report maintained that thousands of unnamed graves had been discovered in the territory and the human rights activists feared that these graves could be of the disappeared Kashmiris.
Addressing a press conference in Srinagar, members of Independent Women's Initiative for Justice in Shopian, a Delhi-based group, said that the authorities were deliberately covering-up the incident of rape and murder of two Kashmiri women to shield the men in uniform.
Meanwhile Jammu and Kashmir Mahaz-e-Azadi (MeA), in a statement issues in Srinagar, had expressed solidarity with the families, whose children had been subjected to enforced disappearance by Indian troops. The MeA said, "We can feel the agony, distress, twinge and pain of those parents whose children disappeared in the custody of troops", KMS reported.