Gets 10-day custody of seven arrested Hurriyat leaders
As seven Kashmiri separatists, including son-in-law of Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Geelani, were sent to 10-day NIA custody by a Delhi court in a terror funding case, the probe agency claimed that it could zero in on them after one and a half months of painstaking investigation which gave it electronic evidence to prove their complicity.
Sources in the National Investigation Agency (NIA) confirmed that the agency managed to track the details of telephonic conversations of as many as 48 local youths, who were regular stone-throwers, with mid-level Hurriyat leaders over the past one year.
It is also learnt that the investigation found that these mid-level Hurriyat leaders were allegedly connected to the top separatists. With this, the NIA sleuths could reconstruct the funding pattern, according to which the top separatists passed on funds to local leaders, who in turn paid the youths to throw stones, the sources said.
Categorising the suspected youths based on their presence at three or more stone-throwing locations in seven or eight districts in the past one year, the sources said, the NIA could zero in on around four dozen “regular” stone-throwers and thus dig out their phone call and social media activity records.
“With such electronic evidence, we would now seek to substantiate it with the investigation on the ground, starting with custodial interrogation of the seven Hurriyat leaders,” an NIA official said.
Meanwhile, besides custodial interrogation of the seven arrested separatists, the NIA, while seeking 18-day remand, informed the court that the accused were to be confronted with each other and with other incriminating evidence. It also submitted that they had to be taken to various places for the purpose of investigation.
Hafiz Saeed, the Pakistan-based chief of the Jamaat-ud-Dawah, the front of the banned the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), has been named in the FIR as an accused, besides organisations such as the Hurriyat Conference (factions led by Geelani and Mirwaiz Farooq), Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) and Dukhtaran-e-Milat.
Arrests psychological crackdown: Hurriyat
Srinagar: The hardline faction of the Hurriyat Conference, headed by Syed Ali Geelani, on Tuesday described the arrests of seven separatists as a “pre-planned psychological crackdown”, aimed at forcing their surrender.
