2 min readSrinagarUpdated: Aug 12, 2026 12:35 PM IST
The State Investigation Agency (SIA) Kashmir Wednesday conducted searches at nine locations across Jammu and Kashmir in connection with a case concerning the alleged abduction and killing of Kashmiri Pandit writer and social worker Sarwanand Koul Premi and his young son, Virender Koul. Residents of Soaf Shali in Kokernag, Anantnag, the Kouls were killed in 1990.
The FIR in the case was registered at Police Station Dooru, Anantnag, and is now being investigated by the SIA.
Sources said that the searches mark a significant development in the long-running investigation, as the SIA intensifies efforts to uncover the circumstances surrounding the killings and bring the probe to a “decisive” stage.
Koul was a Kashmiri writer, poet, and research scholar. He also worked in the J&K education department as a teacher from 1954 to 1977. He and his son were killed in May 1990, and their bodies were found hanging from a tree kilometres away from their house. The surviving family members then fled the valley for Jammu.
This is the second such case being pursued by the SIA this year. In June, the SIA filed a chargesheet after investigating the killing of Sarla Bhat, a 27-year-old nurse in the Neonatology Department of the Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), Soura. Her body was found on the Mallabagh-Omer Colony Road in Srinagar on April 19, 1990.
The SIA’s 737-page chargesheet, filed in a special NIA court in Srinagar, named the then Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front chief Yasin Malik as a key accused in her abduction and killing.
The probe had concluded that the incident “formed part of JKLF’s organised campaign of targeted killings against members of the Kashmiri Pandit community with the objective of creating terror, compelling mass migration and advancing its secessionist agenda.”