London: The Kashmir Centre London has issued special report on the occasion of the Sailan Massacre occurred on 3rd August 1998 in Surankote sub-district of Poonch district of Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir.

According to the Kashmir centre report, Indian occupation forces and Special Police Officers entered Sailan village in Poonch district and massacred 19 members of a single extended family in their homes. 13 of those killed were women who were shot first. Then soldiers used axes, rods and knives to dismember their bodies.

Among the dead was a girl with an axe buried in her hip. A woman 8 months pregnant, her stomach slashed open, the arm of her unborn child visible through the wound. This was not combat. It was collective punishment: revenge against a community for the actions of one of its sons.

The families took the case to court in 2012. The CBI closed it, exonerated the accused and declared the surviving families untruthful.

19 people killed in their homes. The occupation called the witnesses liars.

According to the report, on the night of 3 August 1998, Indian occupation forces and Special Police Officers entered Sailan village in Poonch district and massacred 19 members of a single extended family. They were shot first. Then soldiers used axes, rods and knives to dismember the bodies. Among the dead were women, a pregnant woman whose unborn child was visible through the wound in her stomach, and a girl with an axe buried in her hip. This was collective punishment. This was the occupation's revenge.

15 members of one extended family massacred in their homes in a single night, 13 of the 19 killed were women, including one who had her belly slashed open whilst pregnant. 4 Special Police Officers and personnel of 9 Para Commando Battalion named as perpetrators Convictions. The CBI closed the case, exonerated the murderers and called the families liars.

Sailan is a village in the Surankote tehsil of Poonch district, in the rugged mountain terrain of the Jammu region. Poonch has a long history of resistance to occupation, stretching back to 1947. The Poonch-Rajouri belt, amongst others, has produced generation after generation of fighters who chose defiance over submission. It is in this context that the Sailan massacre must be understood: not as an isolated incident, but as the occupation apparatus's response to a people it could neither pacify nor break.

Imtiyaz Ahmad, known by his code name Major Gul, was from Sailan village itself. In 1996, he crossed into Azad Jammu and Kashmir for training before returning to occupied territory determined to fight. He quickly became one of the most feared figures for the occupation forces and their local collaborators in the region. His reputation was built not only on courage but on discipline and precision - the qualities that made him both effective and respected.

The occupation maintained its grip on communities like Sailan partly through local collaborators. Zakir was one of them: an informer and militia chief who used the backing of the Indian military to torture locals, destroy property, extort free rations and brutally harass the families of resistance fighters. He operated with impunity because the occupation gave him that impunity. Imtiyaz made it his mission to end it. On the morning of 3 August 1998, that mission was accomplished near Bafliaz Bridge. Zakir was killed in the exchange of fire that followed his pursuit.

That same night, Indian occupation forces and Special Police Officers entered Sailan village and went to the homes of Imtiyaz's extended family. They shot nineteen people dead. When the shooting was over, they used axes, rods and knives to dismember the bodies. Arms and legs were severed. Some bodies were nearly decapitated. His sister Javaida was found with an axe buried in her hip. His sister Zarina, eight months pregnant, lay with her stomach slashed open, the arm of her unborn child visible through the wound. This was not the chaos of combat. It was deliberate, methodical savagery, carried out against unarmed civilians as an act of collective punishment.

The massacre at Sailan was not an act of uncontrolled rage. It was a calculated message, directed not just at Imtiyaz but at the entire community: resist the occupation, and it will come for everyone connected to you. The occupation apparatus has used this method across Kashmir since 1990. The targeting of resistance fighters' families, the destruction of their homes, the torture of their relatives all of it is designed to raise the cost of resistance beyond what ordinary people can bear. At Sailan, nineteen members of one family paid that cost with their lives.

The families of those killed at Sailan eventually brought their case to the Jammu and Kashmir High Court in 2012, fourteen years after the massacre. The case was handed The CBI'S to the Central Bureau of Investigation. conclusion: the case should be closed, the named accused should be exonerated, and the families of the victims were untruthful. Nineteen members of three families were killed in their homes. The occupation's own investigative body then called the survivors liars. This is what impunity looks like when it is institutionalised all the way to the top.

The Sailan massacre was designed to break Imtiyaz Ahmad's resolve. It did not. Though his commander ordered him back to safety in Azad Kashmir, he refused. He remained on the front lines, fighting with the same discipline and fearlessness that had defined him from the beginning. He was eventually martyred in a gunfight with Indian occupation forces. His life and death stand as a chapter in Kashmir's long history of resistance that no amount of savagery was able to close.

The Sailan massacre remains one of the most underreported atrocities of the Kashmir conflict. The remoteness of the mountains of Jammu kept it from international attention. The occupation's suppression of press and civil society kept it from the record. But the families of the 19 dead have never stopped speaking. And the mountains of Poonch and Rajouri have not stayed silent.

For more than five years, armed resistance has returned with force to the Jammu region. The echo of Sailan, of what was done there and why, has not faded. It has grown louder. The silence the occupation imposed has broken.