Author: PTI
Publication: The Times of India
Date: January 3, 2011
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/We-not-India-killed-our-own-people-Hurriyat-leader/articleshow/7210759.cms
A senior Hurriyat leader has created a flutter
by saying that two separatist leaders and his brother were killed by "our
own people" and not security agencies, prompting J&K government to
term it as a "late admission" and a call for a probe to fix responsibility.
"No police was involved (in the killings)....
It was our own people who killed them," former Hurriyat Conference chairman
Abdul Gani Bhat said.
He said time had come to speak the truth about
the killers of Mirwaiz Muhammad Farooq and Abdul Gani Lone, who were shot
dead in 2002, and his own brother Mohammad Sultan Bhat, who was murdered in
1995.
Asked to identify the killers, Bhat said,
"What is the need to identify them.... they are already identified."
Farooq, father of the present chairman of
moderate faction of Hurriyat Conference Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was shot dead
at his residence on May 21, 1990 while Lone, father of Hurriyat executive
member Bilal Lone, was gunned down during a commemorative rally for the senior
Mirwaiz on the same day in 2002.
The separatist leaders had earlier blamed
the security forces for the killings.
Bhat said that his brother Mohammad Sultan
Bhat also fell to the bullets of those espousing the separatist cause.
"I had said this then and I am saying
it now. There is no ambiguity or confusion in my mind," he said.
Other moderate Hurriyat leaders chose to maintain
a studied silence on Bhat's remarks.
The state government has held that then Hizbul
Mujahideen commander Mohammad Abdullah Bangroo had killed Mirwaiz Mohammad
Farooq while a commander of Al-Umar Mujahideen had shot dead senior Lone.
Hizbul Mujahideen is considered to be ideologically
inclined towards hardline Hurriyat faction leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani while
Al Umar is believed to be the militant-wing of Awami Action Committee headed
by the Mirwaiz.
Geelani refused to comment on the statements
made by the former Chairman of the undivided Hurriyat Conference.
"I have nothing to say about their remarks,"
Geelani said.
CPM state secretary M Y Tarigami said Bhat's
statement was "revealing" and the incidents need credible investigation.
"A credible investigation should be carried
out so that responsibility for the killings is fixed," Tarigami said.
Sajjad Gani Lone, the youngest son of the
slain leader, had blamed Geelani for the killing but retracted his statement
few years later.
Jammu and Kashmir's DGP Kuldeep Khoda said
that "the person involved in the killing of Mirwaiz Farooq is also buried
in the same 'martyrs' graveyard' where the senior Mirwaiz was laid to rest".
