By Staff Reporter
MUZAFFARABAD: A party worker was shot dead and several other people were wounded on Monday as the first phase of elections in Pakistan-administered Kashmir was marred by gunfire, burnt ballot boxes and mounting accusations of rigging between the territory’s two main political parties.
Polling in the Mirpur division of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) ran an hour longer than scheduled, with the count only getting under way once booths finally closed at 6pm, after officials reported turnout so heavy that the original 5pm cut-off had to be pushed back.
But the day was overshadowed by a shooting in the Nakyal area of Kotli that left one man dead and several injured, feeding a bitter row between the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) — coalition partners in Islamabad who are fierce rivals on the ground in Kashmir.
The two parties spent the day accusing each other of everything from armed intimidation at polling stations to interference by federal officials, while a third party, the Istehkam-e-Pakistan Party (IPP), was accused of orchestrating the theft and burning of ballot boxes in Bhimber district. By evening, with early unofficial results trickling in, PML-N candidates appeared to be opening leads in several of the division’s most closely watched seats.
Party worker killed in Nakyal
The fatal shooting took place at a polling station in the LA-9 Kotli-II constituency, also known as Nakyal, where police said one person was killed and at least three others wounded. Deputy Inspector General Kamran Ali confirmed the death, and polling at the station was suspended for the remainder of the day.
The PPP identified the dead man as Mukhtar Younis, a party worker who had been campaigning for its candidate, the food minister Javed Budhanvi. His body was taken to Tehsil Headquarters Hospital. Mirpur’s divisional commissioner, Raja Tahir Mumtaz, confirmed that one man had died and two others, including the victim’s father, had been injured in the incident.
The PPP squarely blamed the PML-N. In a statement posted on X, the party said Younis had “died during incidents of display of arms and public harassment” by PML-N candidate Sardar Umair Naeem. Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari went further, saying he had received reports that Younis was killed in gunfire opened by Naeem’s supporters.
“My worker has been martyred in Mirpur’s Nakyal,” he said. “Where are the relevant authorities? What is the Election Commission doing?”
Bhutto-Zardari said footage had circulated two days earlier appearing to show Naeem and his companions firing weapons in public, and argued that Younis would still be alive had the authorities acted on it at the time.
The PML-N offered a different account, saying only that Younis had been involved in campaign activity for the party’s rival on the day, and stopped short of directly disputing the PPP’s version of how he died.
Sardar Abdul Shakoor, who heads the PPP’s election cell in AJK, called for the immediate arrest of everyone involved, the restoration of law and order in the area, and guarantees for the safety of voters and their property.
A killing that echoed an earlier one*
Monday’s violence in Nakyal carried an uncomfortable echo of an incident just over two weeks earlier, on 10 July, when a PML-N campaigner was shot dead and two others wounded near Banala village in Kotli — an attack for which the party has blamed PPP activists.
According to Naeem’s focal person, Asrar Liaquat, PML-N leader Malik Abdul Qayyum Shami was travelling in a jeep with two companions, Malik Abdul Hameed and Malik Ashiq Awan, after a campaign event when the vehicle came under fire. Awan was killed instantly; Shami and Hameed were both wounded.
Liaquat said a police complaint over the attack named several PPP activists as suspects, and also named Budhanvi — the food minister whose worker, Younis, would go on to die in Monday’s shooting — on a charge of abetment. Bhutto-Zardari had previously described the case against Budhanvi as politically motivated.
With two campaign workers now dead in the same patch of Kotli within weeks of each other, both parties have reason to feel aggrieved — and little apparent appetite to de-escalate.
Rigging claims fly in both directions
Violence was not the only complaint of the day. Polling was suspended for the remainder of Monday at three stations in Kotli and two in Bhimber following separate incidents, with officials saying any decision on repolling would depend on whether the number of votes affected was large enough to change the outcome in those seats. Several other stations saw brief disruptions from scuffles and heated exchanges between rival supporters.
Both the PPP and PML-N accused each other of attempting to rig the vote in multiple Kotli constituencies, while the IPP faced its own rigging allegations in Bhimber.
In Union Council Throchi, part of the LA-12 (Kotli-V) constituency where PPP’s AJK president Chaudhry Yasin is standing, the party claimed on X that PML-N candidate Raja Riasat Khan had entered polling stations accompanied by armed men in an attempt to influence proceedings. Shakoor said the situation was being compounded by patchy mobile phone coverage, which he said was hampering communication between residents, journalists and rescue services.
The PPP made a similar complaint in the LA-8 constituency, accusing the PML-N of trying to disrupt polling at the Raj Mahal station, and called on the Election Commission to guarantee a fair, transparent and peaceful vote and to punish anyone found violating the code of conduct.
In Bhimber’s Samahni tehsil, the trouble took a more dramatic turn. According to the Mirpur commissioner, supporters of IPP candidate Ali Shan Soni made off with ballot boxes from one polling station, while videos circulating on social media appeared to show men firing weapons nearby. PML-N’s Raja Azhar Iqbal said the affected station accounted for more than 500 votes and confirmed his party had lodged a written complaint with the district returning officer.
At a separate station, individuals linked to Soni set fire to a ballot box. Commissioner Mumtaz said police subsequently took 30 people into custody over the incident.
Presiding officers arrested over pre-poll rigging claim
The allegations of foul play had begun even before polling opened. Rana Sanaullah, the prime minister’s adviser on political affairs, accused PPP’s AJK president Chaudhry Yasin of orchestrating rigging in Kotli’s LA-10 constituency, and said presiding officers implicated in the scheme had been detained.
In an audio clip broadcast by local media, Sanaullah demanded that the AJK government arrest a patwari he named as Qaiser and interrogate him to establish who else might be involved. He said his party would not accept the result in that constituency until such an inquiry had run its course.
The AJK government did not issue any statement directly addressing Sanaullah’s claims. The Election Commission, however, confirmed that two presiding officers in Kotli had been arrested and suspended after reports that they had failed to report to their assigned polling stations and had instead gone to a private residence. It said legal action was being pursued against both under the law, and the Press Information Department said two replacement officers had been deployed after the polling material issued to the original pair was confiscated.
A first information report filed on Sunday night at City Police Station Kotli, however, named three officials rather than two: patwari Qaiser Ali, government school instructor Saqib Faryad, and physics lecturer Mazahir Aslam, all of whom had been assigned to separate polling stations. The FIR alleged the three instead collected polling material from the returning officer’s office and remained together at another individual’s residence, on Qaiser’s suggestion. It noted that rival parties had protested strongly over the episode, which it said amounted to a breach of the electoral code of conduct.
The PPP’s Nadeem Afzal Chan rejected the rigging accusation in a video statement, arguing that his party had raised concerns from the outset about federal government interference, including the presence of PML-N federal ministers at government offices on polling day, and the party’s recent rollout of electric buses in Mirpur and Muzaffarabad.
“Our first demand is that the federal government’s machinery should not interfere at all,” he said, adding: “We will not let rigging happen at any cost. Have some patience and let people cast their vote.”
heavily fortified vote
Officials had gone to considerable lengths to secure Monday’s polling, deploying roughly 18,560 police and other law enforcement personnel alongside around 2,100 soldiers under a three-tier security arrangement — police forming the first line, Pakistan Rangers and the Federal Constabulary the second, and the army the third, with Quick Response Force teams held in reserve. Election monitoring was organised across 13 zones and 205 sectors covering the division.
Of the 2,316 polling stations set up across Mirpur division, 1,241 had been classified “highly sensitive” and a further 724 “sensitive”. A total of 288 candidates contested the 13 constituencies on offer.
Speaking to reporters in the afternoon, AJK’s Inspector General of Police, retired Captain Liaqat Ali Malik, insisted the vote had passed off largely peacefully. He described the day’s more serious flashpoints as “one or two incidents” and characterised the scattered scuffles reported elsewhere as routine political friction rather than cause for alarm.
“Temperatures are usually high” in seats where the race is expected to be close, he said, adding that police would act against anyone attempting to disrupt polling “regardless of their political affiliation” and describing the force’s role as performing its duties in a “neutral, transparent and unbiased” manner. Asked about the unrest in LA-6 and the ballot box fire in Bhimber, he said Quick Response Force units stationed nearby had responded.
Rana Sanaullah offered a broadly similar assessment, telling reporters that polling had remained largely peaceful with only one major incident — an apparent reference to the Nakyal shooting — alongside a handful of minor disturbances. He said overall arrangements had been satisfactory, though he noted the heat had been intense and suggested polling hours could usefully be extended in future to ease pressure on voters.
PPP accuses federal government of interference
Beyond the specific rigging claims, senior PPP figures used the day to press a broader argument: that the federal government, dominated by the PML-N, was tilting the playing field in Kashmir through its control of state resources.
Senator Sherry Rehman, the PPP’s vice president, accused the PML-N of trying to make the election “controversial” out of fear of losing, arguing that Kashmiris were politically astute enough to make up their own minds and that the party’s long relationship with the region could not be undone by what she called underhand tactics. “Regardless of the methods employed by the PML-N,” she said, “victory would belong to the PPP.”
Shazia Marri, the PPP’s information secretary, struck a similarly confident note, describing the party’s arrow symbol as representing “hope” for the people of Mirpur and claiming rival camps had gone quiet in the run-up to voting.
Mr Bhutto-Zardari, appearing in a video message alongside his sister Asifa Bhutto-Zardari, urged voters to turn out if they wanted “Kashmir’s future to be decided by the Kashmiri people,” appealing to them to back the PPP’s arrow symbol at the ballot box.
Clashes in Bhimber’s LA-6
A further flashpoint emerged in the LA-6 constituency in Bhimber, where a clash broke out between rival party workers at the Darbar Baba Shadi Shaheed polling station. PML-N candidate Abdul Razzaq Chaudhry accused rival supporters of starting the altercation, and separately alleged that IPP workers had caused disruption at Polling Station No. 95. He said polling had been suspended at both locations as a result.
The district returning officer confirmed a clash had occurred at Darbar Baba Shadi Shaheed, saying unidentified individuals had snatched a ballot box containing 232 votes and set it alight. Returning officer staff and security personnel remained on site, the DRO said, and legal action would follow against those responsible, while a decision on repolling at the affected station would be taken later. He said the situation elsewhere in the constituency remained normal.
The DRO added that former prime minister Anwarul Haq had lodged a separate complaint concerning LA-7, and said he had personally visited the polling stations involved, where Haq’s polling agents were present.
A vote held against a backdrop of unrest
Monday’s election was always going to be fought under strain. The Chief Election Commissioner, Justice (retd) Ghulam Mustafa Mughal, announced only last week that the vote would be staggered across three phases beginning 27 July, a decision taken after weeks of unrest across the territory.
That unrest has been driven largely by the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), a civil society coalition that authorities banned last month under anti-terrorism legislation. The group has spent weeks staging protests demanding the abolition of the 12 AJK assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees, arguing the arrangement allows Pakistan’s mainstream parties to shape governments in Kashmir from outside — a claim both Islamabad and AJK authorities reject. Clashes between JAAC supporters and law enforcement have left around 30 people dead in recent weeks, according to reporting from the territory.
The JAAC’s campaign suffered a legal setback last month when the AJK Supreme Court ruled that the refugee seats carry constitutional protection and cannot be scrapped through executive or administrative action alone. The group has boycotted Monday’s election outright.
AJK Chief Secretary Khushal Khan warned at the weekend, in comments carried by state broadcaster Radio Pakistan, of “serious consequences” for anyone attempting to disrupt polling or the wider law-and-order situation.
Justice Mughal, addressing reporters as voting got under way, said the process was proceeding in a peaceful environment, while officials confirmed that counting would begin in phases once polling closed, with the transmission of results also expected to proceed gradually through the evening.
There are more than 1.4 million registered voters across Mirpur division, comprising roughly 725,000 men and 675,000 women. The wider AJK assembly is elected across 45 seats in total: 33 territorial constituencies plus the 12 refugee seats at the heart of the JAAC’s grievance.
Voting in Muzaffarabad division, along with the refugee seats, will follow on 2 August, with Poonch division going to the polls on 10 August to complete the three-phase process.
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