ANC welcomes NIA probe into Liyaqat arrest

Srinagar:  Jammu and Kashmir Awami National Conference Tuesday welcomed the decision to entrust the National Investigation Agency with investigation of the ‘dramatic arrest’ of former Kashmiri militant, Syed Liaqat Shah, by Special Cell of Delhi Police.
“The Union Home Ministry and the state government should come clean on the issue, more so to send a no-nonsense message to those involved in compulsively hounding innocent Kashmiri youth and implicating them in fabricated cases to trifle with their lives,” party’s senior vice-president, Muzaffar Shah, said in a statement, adding the trend, if not curbed with a heavy hand, was bound to deliver a rude set-back to the confidence building measures between the two countries. He said there was enough weight in the statement of Shah’s wife, Akhtar-un-Nisa, that she and her husband had entered the country through Indo-Nepal border after Syed Liaqat Shah had decided to surrender to authorities and return to the national mainstream under the Rehabilitation Policy. “The Jammu and Kashmir Police and the central Intelligence Bureau were in fully aware of it, “he said. Shah said that if Shah’s wife were to be believed, it was unfortunate that the over-zealous officials of the Special Cell of Delhi Police had arrested him after cooking up a cock-and-bull story about a conspiracy that he was going to carry out a fidayeen attack in Delhi. Regardless of Syed Liaqat’s surrender under the Rehabilitation Policy, the ANC leader said, his stage-managed arrest was a serious matter the government of India and the state government could not ignore or take nonchalantly.