Daily Diary (DD) - Day 178 of 2023

2347hrs:

....All the way....

....

Another needless set of tragedies on the LOC, this time in Poonch Sector:

I shall copy the text written within the video description here:

#LOC #CivilianKillings #Poonch 

Muhammad Qasim 61 year old son of Muhammad Deen and Muhammad Ubaid 22 year old son of Abdul Qayoom (both of Tithrinote) lost their lives to Indian sniper fire despite being well inside the Pakistani controlled zone of the LOC, resting under the shade of a tree while their livestock grazed the pastures.

This was the same tree that the Pakistani army used as a shade in the past, as recently as the day before this event.

Both Qasim & Ubaid had spent their lives in agriculture and looking after their livestock. While these two succumbed to Indian sniper fire, a third local Abdul Majeed (alias Bhutto) - 35 years of age - was injured and managed to drag himself to a Pakistani post where he was given a pain killer but detained for a few hours while the Pakistani army refused to tend to the other two civilians shot. In fact, they prevented others from going to retrieve them.

  

This land on which the 3 fellow villagers were sitting is locally known as the land of Professor Saidullah. According to Ubaid's father Qasim the LOC was more than 500 yards away from this location, while the nearest Indian army post was a further 100 yards away, from where these sniper shots were fired.

By around 2pm (over a couple of hours later) local villagers could not wait any longer for the Pakistani army to give them permission to retrieve the 2 fellow villagers lying injured or dead under the shade of the tree. The local villagers tore off their vests to use them as white flags to reach them. The 61 year old Qasim was already dead while the relatively younger 22 year old Ubaid was still breathing.

Local ambulances in the vicinity refused to come to their aid. Eventually, a local Mazda truck was used to take Ubaid to a local dispensary while the other villager Qasim's dead body was taken to his home. The local dispensary had nothing to treat Ubaid with and he was then rushed to Hajeera (tehsil headquarter - THQ) hospital, over 10 kilometres away.

At the THQ, there was little that the hospital staff could do either to prevent Ubaid's death.  

In the subsequent days, nobody from the Pakistani army came to condole the dead. However some people from the Rawalakot administration did come to enquire of what happened.

The overall scenario of the LOC in this region of Poonch - in particular - suggests that locals are being driven away from lands where their livestock grazes and where they would previously sow crops for livelihood, in preparation for what appears to be a back-door agreement between India and Pakistan to define the LOC as an international border, without the local people's reference.

....