NEW DELHI, India, Aug. 27 -- India has released eight captured Pakistani soldiers and the International Committee of Red Cross handed over the prisoners of war to their High Commission in New Delhi. A spokesman of India's foreign ministry said the troops were taken captive during the recent conflict in Kashmir in which 1,350 people were killed. Islamabad had initially denied that its troops were involved in the fighting saying the conflict was between the Indian forces and Kashmiri freedom fighters. The ICRC had been holding parleys with the two arch foe neighbors ever since New Delhi offered to hand them over as a 'goodwill gesture' on Aug. 14, the 52nd anniversary of Pakistan's independence. ICRC's main representative in India, Michel Ducraux, said, 'The role of the ICRC now ends here and they (POWs) are now the responsibility of the Pakistani authorities.' In a related development, the Indian troops exhumed bodies of five Pakistani soldiers killed in the Kashmir conflict and handed them to Islamabad. The Indian Express newspaper says that bodies were exhumed on the request of Pakistani authorities. Scores of Pakistani troops killed in the Indian side of Kashmir during the 10-week conflict were buried by the Indian soldiers with religious rites. The news report said that London-based grandparents of one of the killed Pakistani soldier, Capt. Taimur Malik, wrote a moving letter to Indian and Pakistani authorities seeking their grandson's body. Malik's septuagenarian grandfather, living in London for 49 years, wrote that he was certified blind and his wife was suffering from angina.
The letter said that Malik's mother was suffering from skin cancer and doctors had given her very little time to live. 'His mother wants him buried at the ancestral grave site and pray by its side for her remaining years,' the letter read. Indian troops claim that Islamabad has refused to accept scores of bodies of their troops for that would prove its involvement in the conflict. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since gaining independence from British rule in 1947. ---
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