India’s State Investigation Agency (SIA) has named Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chairman Mohammad Yasin Malik as the principal accused in the 36-year-old murder case of Kashmiri Pandit nurse Sarla Bhat. The SIA filed a 737-page charge sheet before a special court in Srinagar on June 29, 2026, formally implicating Malik in the killing.
According to the charge sheet, Bhat, a 27-year-old staff nurse at the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), was abducted, tortured and shot dead on April 18, 1990. Investigators allege the murder was part of a wider JKLF conspiracy aimed at terrorising the Kashmiri Pandit community and forcing their mass exodus from the valley.
The SIA also addressed long-standing claims that Bhat had been an informer, stating that such allegations were unsubstantiated and were merely used as a pretext to justify her killing.
Of the five individuals named in the charge sheet, three are already dead, and the whereabouts of one accused remain unknown, leaving Malik as the sole living and reachable defendant in the case.
Malik is currently lodged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail, where he is serving double life imprisonment after being arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on April 10, 2019, in a separate terror-funding case.
The fresh charge sheet adds to the list of serious criminal cases Malik faces, reviving scrutiny of the JKLF’s role in the violence that gripped Kashmir in 1990, a period marked by targeted killings and the displacement of the Kashmiri Pandit community from the region.
