The family of Jammu and Kashmir police officer Mushtaq Ahmed Lone remained stuck between the devil and deep sea in the trouble-torn region marred by bloodshed of three decades. The happiness for the Lone family couldn’t survive even the three days of Eid-Ul-Adha
On April 28, 2020, the bullets of security forces silenced Lone’s youthful son, Aqib Mushtaq, accused of militant activities in his native Kulgam district of south Kashmir. More than two years later, the nationalist father, who stood for the Tricolor was killed on duty by terrorists in Lal Bazar area on the outskirts of Srinagar city, on the third day of the Muslim festival.
Aqib, who had completed B Tech from a Chandigarh college, was neutralised during a gunfight with security forces in south Kashmir whereas on the third day of this Eid-ul Azha, his father, on guard at a ‘naka’, was killed in the terror strike. Two of Mushtaq’s subordinate policemen were wounded in the attack turning festivities into mourning for the bereaved family.
Another son of the slain Lone reportedly works as an engineer in the Army. This is not the first incident in Kashmir where members of the same family were killed by two opposite sides involved in the conflict.
The killing has shaken the people of the Valley, who expressed their grief over the incident on social media. Majid Hyderi, a journalist and TV debater while expressing grief and shock over the incident, said, “This is the irony of Kashmir that you are stuck between two fires and a bullet is enough to destroy an entire family.”
“And the bigger irony is that no one knows till how long this dance of death and destruction will continue to haunt us all because otherwise we were told that the decisions taken on August 5, 2019, would bring back the era of peace and prosperity, which Kashmir was world famous for,” he added.
Another senior journalist from the Valley, Mir Fareed, while sharing pictures of the slain father-son duo wrote on his Facebook timeline: “2 piks (pictures) that aptly describe the tragedy named kashmir, why it’s a quagmire in more than 1 manifestation of the word (sic).” “Pik (picture) 1 is akib mustaq, a B-tech student but JEM militant killed in an encounter in April of 2020… Pik 2 (pictures) his father mustaq ahmed killed in a militant attack today,” he wrote. Another netizen, Amerjeet Singh, wrote: “Land of sorrows …we r in denial Its not rosey..its blood on roads (sic).”
