The Jammu and Kashmir State Investigation Agency (SIA) has reopened the investigation into the 1998 Wandhama massacre, in which 23 Kashmiri Pandits were killed in central Kashmir’s Ganderbal district. The move comes nearly three decades after the case remained unresolved.
The massacre took place on the intervening night of January 25 and 26, 1998, when a group of militants wearing army fatigues entered Wandhama village. According to reports, the attackers gathered members of Kashmiri Pandit families before opening fire. Twenty-three people, including nine women and four children, were killed.
The victims belonged to families who had remained in Kashmir after the mass migration of Kashmiri Pandits following the outbreak of militancy in the Valley in 1990. Five of those killed were reportedly visitors from Jammu who had come to meet relatives.
The police had registered a case following the massacre, but the investigation did not reach a conclusive outcome. The SIA has now taken up the case again as part of a wider effort to revisit several unresolved killings of Kashmiri Pandits from the early years of militancy.
Officials said the fresh investigation will involve examining earlier records and available evidence, reviewing the previous probe and pursuing new leads. The agency is also expected to rely on witness statements and other credible evidence to establish the sequence of events and identify those responsible.
The reopening of the Wandhama case is part of a broader SIA investigation into several high-profile killings. The agency has also revisited cases involving Kashmiri Pandit leader Tika Lal Taploo and retired judge Neelkanth Ganjoo. It has separately investigated the killing of Kashmiri Pandit nurse Sarla Bhat.
The SIA has said its objective is to establish the facts through evidence and witness testimony and bring the decades-old cases to their logical conclusion.
The reopening of the Wandhama massacre case is significant for the victims' families and comes amid renewed efforts by investigators to examine unresolved cases linked to militancy-era violence in Jammu and Kashmir.
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