A government human rights commission in Kashmir on Tuesday evening said it will review records from the 1995 abduction of Western tourists after a new book claimed that four of six foreign tourists were murdered by a pro-India militia to discredit India’s arch-rival Pakistan.

On July 4, 1995, Americans Donald Hutchings and John Childs, as well as Britons Paul Wells and Keith Mangan were kidnapped by the little known Al-Faran militant group while trekking in the Himalayas near Pahalgam, 97 km (60 miles) southeast of Srinagar.

Four days later, Childs escaped. On the same day, the captors abducted German Dirk Hasert and Norwegian Hans Christian Ostroe. Ostroe was found beheaded in August 1995. The others were never found.

Journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, whose book “The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began” is about the abduction, claim that the four Westerners were murdered by a pro-government militia group who worked for Indian security forces.

After Ostroe was beheaded, Al-Faran was ready to strike a monetary deal to free the hostages and might have released them for £250,000, the authors claim. They say the deal was deliberately sabotaged.

“It appeared that there were some in the Indian establishment who did not want this never-ending bad news story of Pakistani cruelty and Kashmiri inhumanity to end, even when the perpetrators themselves were finished,” the book says.

Summer has set in in scenic Kashmir, melting snow on the high Himalayan mountain passes and allowing easier movement of separatist militants from the Pakistani side.

But this year, rebel incursion into Kashmir is down to its lowest level since the separatist revolt began in 1989.

Syed Atta Hasnain, General Officer Commanding of the Indian army’s Kashmir-based 15 Corps, recently said that for the first time infiltration has come down to zero in the last 20 years.

No militant has been able to sneak into the Kashmir Valley so far this year, local media reports. There were two failed infiltration bids near the Line of Control (LoC), the heavily militarised ceasefire line dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

But peace still remains a distant prospect in Kashmir, a region at the heart of decades of animosity between Pakistan and India, and more recently, the scene of massive street protests which erupted in the past three summers.

The Indian army built a three-metre high barbed wire fence along much of the 742-km (460-mile) LoC in 2003. But the fence failed to stop incursions.

Is the Pakistani government making efforts this time to stop infiltration and give peaceful resolution a chance?

Hundreds of Muslim militants based in the Pakistani part of Kashmir are ready to give up arms and return to their homes in the Indian part of the Himalayan region following New Delhi’s formal approval of a rehabilitation policy for rebels.

The policy was introduced by India last year for militants who had crossed over to Pakistan-administered Kashmir to be trained and join militant groups fighting New Delhi’s rule in Kashmir.

Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, said the government has received nearly 700 applications from militants who are in the Pakistani part of Kashmir and want to return home.

“Out of the total applications received, 125 have been cleared by authorities for the militants to return to the state,” Abdullah said.

He added that the information will be passed to the families of militants on how they can come back. But the government says militants “must renounce violence and accept the integrity of India.”

There are no figures on how many people from Indian Kashmir are currently on the Pakistani side.

Thousands of people have crossed over to Pakistani Kashmir for arms training since a revolt against India broke out in 1989.

Amnesty International has accused the government of detaining hundreds of people each year in Kashmir without charge or trial under a “draconian” Indian law.

The rights group said India’s Public Safety Act (PSA)  had been used to detain up to 20,000 people without trial over the past two decades. Public Safety Act allows for detention without trial for up to two years.

Tens of thousands have died in the disputed region, which India and Pakistan claim in full but rule in parts, since a revolt against New Delhi’s broke out in 1989.

“The Jammu and Kashmir authorities are using PSA detentions as a revolving door to keep people they can’t or won’t convict through proper legal channels locked up and out of the way,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Director.

Here’s the Amnesty International report released in Srinagar on Monday.

Earlier in January, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya, also called for reforms including the repeal of laws giving security forces wide powers of arrest across Kashmir.

Rebel violence is on decline. But there has been a resurgence of street protests across the strife-torn region. At least 110 people were killed last year and dozens were wounded, mostly by police bullets, during the protests, the biggest in 21 years.

A former Indian soldier, accused of killing a Kashmiri human rights lawyer, has been arrested in the United States on charges of domestic violence.

Major Avtar Singh fled the country in the 1990s after he was accused of kidnapping and brutally killing Jaleel Andrabi, a Kashmiri lawyer and human rights activist.

Andrabi’s decomposed body was found 15 years ago in a river. The killing sparked off massive protests and led to a probe by authorities.

The government of Jammu and Kashmir is now seeking the extradition of Singh from the United States.

A Times of India report said a special investigating team found Singh could have been involved in six more extrajudicial killings in Kashmir.

“The accused is in California police’s preventive custody. He would (be) shifted to Srinagar in 15 days,” said senior police official Raja Ajaz Ali, who is also Interpol liaison officer for Kashmir.

Government forces in the Himalayan state have been accused in the past of murdering civilians in staged gunbattles and passing them off as separatist militants to earn rewards and promotions.

When thousands gathered in an Indian army camp in Kashmir recently, people started asking questions: Is this another protest against New Delhi’s rule?

The answer came as a surprise to many and as a shock to some.

Nearly 10,000 youth had gathered to try their luck in a recruitment drive by the Indian army in the disputed region and not to protest against alleged excesses by security forces.

A BBC report said that by taking part in the Indian army’s recruitment rally, Kashmiri youth have disregarded the region’s “struggle for independence which has been ongoing for the last 20 years.”

Tens of thousands have died since 1989 in Kashmir, which is claimed both by India and Pakistan.

“The week-long rally is being held barely a few months after last year’s widespread public unrest during which more than 100 people were killed,” the BBC report said.

Last year, the death of a teenage boy by a police teargas shell triggered massive protests, the biggest since a separatist revolt against Indian rule broke out.