Minor’s detention under PSA: Mehbooba lashes out at Omar

Srinagar:  A day after chief minister Omar Abdullah suggested medical examination to ascertain age of a ‘minor’ detained under Public Safety Act in Anantnag district of south Kashmir, the opposition PDP president, Mehbooba Mufti termed the response as bizarre. “It is very bizarre response of Chief Minister Omar Abdullah to imprison 14 year old Faizan and other youngsters under PSA. He is trying to discredit the established systems like that of age certification to prove himself correct,” Mehbooba Mufti said in a statement here to.She rejected the Omar’s observation that the age of Faizan from Anantnag needed to be medically verified as according to him the “certificates were fake in most cases”.Mehbooba, daughter of former home minister of India—Mufti Mohammad Say eed—said it was no less than a misfortune for the state that a chief minister, “who is blissfully disinterested in what he has made out of a state that was on way to peace and defiant in blocking any probe into the killing of 117 unarmed civilians at the hands of his security forces”, should call for investigating the age of a schoolboy. She said that the boy was a victim of his government in any case.  Mehbooba said the Chief Minister of a state could not be more insensitive than that in questioning the juvenile status of a class 10th student just to defend the “indefensible action” of his government putting a minor in jail for two years without trial or any proven charges. “Faizan is in any case not a lone victim of brazen atrocities by a state apparatus that is out to cage an entire people on a flimsy pretext that something was brewing against it in the coming summer.”She reiterated that this was a sure way of destabilizing the situation in Kashmir and upset lives of ordinary people.The PDP president alleged that the present government had willfully “unleashed a reign of terror” on all fronts.“The grenade attack in Srinagar in which an innocent engineer lost his life, the killing of a contractor in Kreeri the other day or sodomization of a boy allegedly a member of government forces in Marmat Doda are  only the latest wake up calls for the people of the state against the dark forces.”