Kashmir court acquits three accused of harbouring terrorists
Terrorists shot dead BJP leader Sheikh Waseem Bari, his father and brother inside their shop in Bandipora, July 2020.
The Long Wait for Justice: A Widow’s Empty Verdict
The news reached her not through a lawyer or a family member, but through a scrolling ticker on a small television in a neighbour’s house. Nusrat Jan stood frozen, a metal pail of water forgotten in her hand, as the words crawled across the screen: “Three accused acquitted in BJP leader Sheikh Waseem Bari murder case.”
Five years. Five summers, five harsh winters in Bandipora, waiting. And this was the end? Not a conviction, not a confession, just a quiet legal phrase: “benefit of doubt.”
She set the pail down slowly and walked back inside her home. The house still felt empty, even after all this time. It was a museum of grief. On a shelf, a framed photograph showed her husband, Sheikh Waseem Bari, laughing, his arm around his father, Bashir Ahmad Sheikh. Beside it was a smaller picture of her brother-in-law, Umar Saeed, who had just started helping at the family shop. Three generations. Three men. All gone in the span of a few bloody minutes on a July evening in 2020.
Nusrat remembered that night with a clarity that time could not dull. The shop was their life. Waseem would come home for dinner, smelling of spices and hope. That night, he never came. She heard the commotion first, the frantic shouts from the market, the distant crackle of gunfire that didn’t sound like firecrackers. She had run, her chappal falling off, her youngest child wailing in a neighbour’s arms. She reached the shop to find a crowd, and then, the bodies. Her husband, his father, his brother, lying on the floor of their own store, surrounded by sacks of rice and lentils, as if they were just more goods to be inventoried.
The terrorists had walked in casually, asked for Waseem by name, and opened fire. No warning. No demand. Just bullets. The killers had fled, melting into the twilight.
For five years, Nusrat raised her children on memories and the fragile hope that the law would bring some measure of accountability. She attended every court hearing, sitting quietly in the back, watching the backs of the three men accused of harbouring the killers. She studied their faces—Abrar, Muneer, Mohammad Waqar. They were local boys, from her own district. They looked ordinary. They looked like neighbours. That was the most unsettling part.
The trial dragged on. Seventeen witnesses took the stand. Policemen, neighbours, forensics experts. Nusrat didn’t understand the legal arguments, the discussions of Section 39 of the UAPA, or the weight of “circumstantial evidence.” She only understood that every night, she ate alone, and her children asked why their father wasn’t coming home.
On Wednesday, the verdict came. The judge, in an 89-page order, said the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. There was no “direct, circumstantial, forensic or technical nexus” between the three accused and the attack. They were acquitted. Given the benefit of doubt.
The benefit of doubt. Nusrat rolled the phrase around in her mind. Did the gunmen who killed her husband have the benefit of doubt when they aimed their weapons? Did her father-in-law, an old man who only wanted to see his grandchildren grow up, have a moment of doubt before the bullet found him?
She thought of the two other accused, still absconding, still out there somewhere. The proceedings against them would continue, the court said. More waiting. More hearings. More years.
In Bandipora, the news spread quickly. Some saw it as a failure of investigation, others as a quirk of a legal system that rightly demands high standards of proof. But for Nusrat Jan, sitting alone in her fading photograph-adorned home, it was simply another layer of loss.
The shop had been reopened by a relative, but she couldn’t bear to go there. She could still picture the three of them, laughing together behind the counter. Now, the men accused of helping their killers were free, walking the same streets, breathing the same air. And she was left with the only thing the court could not acquit or convict: an endless, aching silence where her husband’s voice used to be.