When Kargil’s dead end up in Pakistan: Families demand exchange point as rivers sweep bodies across LoC | India News
4 min readSrinagarMay 3, 2026 07:09 AM IST On March 20, a day after he celebrated his sixth birthday, Zulqarnain Ali and his cousin Ali Akbar (6) stepped out to play at Hundurman, the last village before the Line of Control (LoC) in Kargil. While playing, the boys slipped into the fast-flowing waters of the Shingo River. Akbar’s body was retrieved from the river in Hundurman a day later, but Zulqarnain couldn’t be traced. On Friday evening, a WhatsApp call from across the border informed the family that the body had been retrieved and buried in Gangani village of Baltistan, across the LoC. “He (Zulqarnain) would never go towards the river,” says his father Mohammad Hussain (38), a government school teacher. “They were three children, Zulqarnain, my sister’s son and another boy, relatively older. The older boy survived but these two drowned.” This is not the first such tragedy in Kargil. Javid Ali, who runs the Al Mehdi Scouts and helps search for bodies in the Shingo and Suru rivers, says, “There are at least …
