Torture Haunts Kashmir Victims

SRINAGAR, KASHMIR, INDIA - DECEMBER 26: Nazir Ahmad Sheikh, 40, a torture victim poses with his amputated and prosthetic legs on December 26, 2010 in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian administered Kashmir, India. Sheikh, a resident of north Kashmir, says he was picked up and tortured by Indian armys 14 Dogra Regiment in December 1994. Although he had no militancy or criminal record, Sheikh says the Indian army soldiers pushed his left hand into a charcoal oven, and rolled his legs over with a steel rod in order to extract a false confession of being a Pakistan trained militant and having a gun to surrender. He lost four fingers and both legs in the torture, and had to sell a piece of ancestral paddy land to buy artificial limbs. According to a 2005 cable, released by WikiLeaks recently, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told American diplomats in New Delhi that it had found systematic prisoner abuse by armed forces during detention centre visits in Kashmir from 2002 and 2004. The WikiLeaks cable said the nternational Committee of the Red Cross (lCRC) had told US diplomats that police and paramilitary, who are fighting in Kashmir, beat suspects, subjected them to electric currents and tortured them with water in widespread abuse of human rights. (Photo by Yawar Nazir/Getty Images)