Author: Virendra Kapoor
Publication: Afternoon Despatch
and Courier
Date: June 16, 2002
Ultimately greed proved his undoing.
The Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, detained under POTA last week,
was so impatient for money from his ISI handlers, that he walked into the
trap laid by the Indian intelligence agencies. Following the terrorist
attack on Parliament House on December 13, the authorities had clamped
down on underground channels of funding of militant Kashmiri groups. The
ISI operatives in the Valley sensed as much and were lying low in the hope
that the authorities would, sooner than later, lower the guard and revert
back to the old and lethargic ways. But Geelani was unwilling to put up
with the temporary disruption in the flow of funds and angrily threatened
the ISI interlocutors in Srinagar that he would turn off the tap of militancy
as it were if the promised installments of money did not reach on time.
Even when Dr Ayub Thakur, the London-based
Kashmiri expatriate and the head of the so-called World Kashmir Freedom
Forum who used to route ISI funds to Geelani, pleaded patience saying that
it was hard at that stage to evade the increased scrutiny on the movement
of money through the usual hawala channels inside the Valley, Geelani remained
unconvinced. He threatened to sever his links with the militant group if
he failed to get his money as per the earlier schedule. In desperation,
Thakur sent Rs 2 lakhs through a fictitious bank account to one Imtiyaz
Ahmad Bazaz, who was using the cover of a journalist, for being passed
on to Geelani. When Bazaz went to the bank to withdraw the cash, the sleuths
from the intelligence agencies were waiting to nab him.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Bazaz was 'interrogated' and confessed that he was but a minor cog in the
ISI operations in which Geelani was one of the more important props. That
is how General Musharraf's so-called 'freedom movement in Kashmir' was
being kept alive. 'No money, no militancy' was the slogan of greedy men
like Geelani who were openly diverting a good part of the cash paid by
ISI for living it up in style and for investing in real estate.
The transcripts of the telephonic
conversations between Geelani and his local ISI contacts now form a vital
part of the police records. Geelani, a former chairman of the All Party
Hurriyat Conference and leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, had publicly swore
allegiance to Pakistan during an interview to a private television channel.
On its part, Pakistan was quick to condemn Geelani's arrest. Meanwhile,
the Union Home Ministry is confident that its case for the extradition
of Ayub Thakur will elicit a positive response from the British government.
Thakur, a Kashmiri expatriate, it seems does not have a valid passport
but has had no difficulty carrying on anti-India activities as the ISI
point man in London. An application for his extradition is to be made soon.
