Another Kashmiri walked out of jail on July 30 after spending 16 prime years of his life there on spurious charges. The Srinagar resident, Sheikh Imran, then 16, was acquitted by the West Bengal High Court earlier this month of the charges of smuggling ammunition for AK-47 rifles into Kolkata in 2003. The victim had just finished his class 10 board exam when a local police team picked him up from his house and later handed him over to Kolkata police who booked him and five others in an arms act case. The trial dragged on for a decade during which the victim was incarcerated in a Kolkata jail. Although his friends and family kept pleading that he was innocent, the court as well as the investigation agencies refused to accept their pleas. He was convicted by a lower court in Kolkata and handed over life imprisonment in 2013. However, the family approached the higher judiciary and on July 4, the West Bengal high court struck down the judgement of the lower court and ordered his immediate release. Imran spent 16 prime years of his life behind the bars and no amount of money or job can compensate him for the loss of his youth. But Imran is not the first person to be wrongly framed by security agencies in cases of arms smuggling and other militancy cases. Earlier this month, four persons from Jammu and Kashmir were released from a jail in Rajasthan after spending 24 years in darkness. One of them lost both his parents while struggling to prove his innocence from behind the four walls of the jail. There have been similar instances in past where innocent Kashmiris were framed by investigative agencies and thrown into jail, only because they were Muslims and Kashmiris. This systematic attack on Kashmiri identity by various agencies made especially the people of the Valley to look at the mainland with eyes of suspicion. It has betrayed the trust and confidence that Kashmiris could have found in Indian mainland. Now that some of the boys have come home, it is important that the government, both the state as well as the Centre, devises a mechanism so that the cases of Kashmiris who are being held in various jails of the country are taken up expeditiously. It is quite likely that many more innocent Kashmiris are being held on trumped up charges. Assessing their cases on merit and setting them free at the earliest will be a great service to the cause of justice.