SRINAGAR: Thirteen children are among 23 people arrested while allegedly trying to cross the Line of Control over to Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Sources say the members of six families had moved to Keran sector of the valley’s Kupwara district and were spotted by an army patrol.
Defence Spokesman Naresh Vig denied that the Army was involved.
However a local news agency quotes unnamed police sources as saying that soldiers of the Army’s 13 Brigade arrested the families and handed them over to the police.
“The total number of arrests are 23 – including 6 men, 4 women and 13 children,” they said.
The agency reports that one among the group managed to flee an army cordon and crossed over to the Pakistani side.
The group had travelled to Keran on the pretext of attending a marriage, but the security forces became wary after knowing that there was no such function in the area.
Sources have told FreePress that one of the arrested persons includes a brother of separatist leader Mohammad Maqbool Bhat, hanged in Delhi’s Tihar jail in the eighties.
Mr Bhat hails from Kupwara district’s Trehgam area.
Many among those who accompanied him had returned to the valley from Muzaffarabad under the government’s rehabilitation policy for former militants.
Police sources who spoke to us said the group had travelled to Keran on the pretext of attending a marriage, but the security forces became wary after knowing that there was no such function in the area.
