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| Protest rocks Srinagar | | | Early Times Report
Srinagar, Nov 07: Violence erupted in central Srinagar, and the police had to fire in the air to disperse mobs, after a vendor was found gruesomely murdered in Maisuma.
The victim, a forty-two-year-old barbeque vendor from Saraibala, was found dumped in his workshop in the central city with his throat slit on Saturday morning by a fruit-seller who rented the adjacent store, reports said.
Muhammad Maqbool Ganai had been missing since yesterday when he failed to return home from work.
The news of his grisly killing sparked off violence in Maisuma, Lal Chowk, Hari Singh High Street and neighbouring areas as groups of youth began pelting stones on shops and passing vehicles.
Nearly 30 people, including six policemen and two media persons, were injured and over 50 vehicles damaged as the violence swept through the central city, closing down shops and disrupting traffic, even as the police fought to control the mobs.
Sensing the situation go out of hand, the police resorted to cane charges and tear gassing, but this only added fuel to the fire, as the mobs retaliated with heavy stone pelting.
Tension continued to grip the areas till late in the evening, with violent incidents breaking out intermittently.
The victim leaves behind two young children and a wife whom he used to support by his daily toil.
His brother, Tariq Ahmad, said that after Ganai failed to return home till late yesterday, the family tried to contact him on phone but kept receiving a busy signal, and eventually that too stopped as the handset was apparently switched off.
The senior superintendent of the police (SSP) for Srinagar, Javed Riyaz Bedar, described the killing as routine crime and said that a murder case had been registered.
According to the SSP, the victim had a small two-room workshop on the Maisuma bund, with a fruit vendor’s store right next to it. The fruit seller had found the body as he entered his store as usual in the morning, and then informed the police, he said.
The police officer surmised that Ganai had had an argument with some youth the previous night that had turned violent when some unknown persons attacked him with a knife, inflicting wounds on his throat and wrists.
The injuries caused Maqbool to die on the spot, the police officer said. SSP Bedar appealed to the public to maintain peace and order, and in no case take the law into their own hands. He claimed that the police had obtained important clues in the case, and that the guilty would be swiftly brought to book.
Maqbool’s killing comes around four months after the murder of a Maisuma youth, Asrar Mushtaq, who had been done to death by friends over cyber-girlfriend rivalry.
Asrar’s body had been recovered from a graveyard in downtown Srinagar several days after his disappearance during which the city had witnessed violent protests against the police and the government, the dominant sentiment having been that state forces were responsible for the disappearance.
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